By Ashleigh Chicko / Staff Writer

In lieu of the economic crisis, Pitt-Greensburg is experiencing budget cuts in many of its departments.

Every semester, the university is faced with a changing number of students coming in and out of programs but this semester the budget cuts have taken away yet another fall and spring offered capstone.

The English Writing Capstone has been taken away due to budget cuts for the fall session of 2009 and will now only be offered in the spring session of 2010.

“We’ve been watching the numbers and they’re consistently pretty low, so we decided to only offer it once a year. We’re a pretty small campus which has its benefits but we are also subject to limitations,” Wes Jamison, Vice-President of Academic Affairs, said.

This changes things for people needing the writing capstone and anticipating graduation in December of 2009.

“If there was a student hoping to graduate in the fall, they could speak to the faculty and make arrangements. It’s about negotiations,” Jamison said. “Advisors were notified and should have scheduled their students who anticipated graduation in the Fall of 2009 with an English writing degree to take capstone this semester.”

Joy Pinkney, senior English writing major, faces the dilemma of delaying her graduation date to the spring of 2010.

“My financial aid only pays for my semester if I’m a full-time student so I have to take extra classes to fill both semesters,” Pinkney said. “It’s not what I wanted and my advisor did not know about the changes. I only found out from running into a writing professor and asked her about it but I’m going to take some extra writing classes that I’ve been wanting to take.”

Pinkney is one of the three known students who were planning on graduating in December of 2009 with an English writing degree.

Other capstone courses, such as English literature and criminal justice, have faced the same issues to limit the semesters they are offered to only once a school year.