Very interesting. The politicians of West Virginia want to prop up the oil and mining industries. Young people do not want careers that destroy the planet. So the solution is: eliminate World Languages?
What actually happened was:
1. WVU is running out of money
2. They hired a team to devise a way to fairly eliminate programs.
3. That team decided that student enrollment should be the key metric to drive program elimination, but recognized three exceptions.
4. Both World Language and Extractive Resource Engineering programs have declining enrollment, thus would be slated to be eliminated.
5. The extractive resource engineering programs qualify for one of three exceptions which was significance to the local region and economy.
6. Thus those majors will be combined/restructured and downsized rather than being outright eliminated.
It's also worth noting that while you can merge the Mining Engineering major with the P&NG Engineering major in a clean way since there is significant overlap in coursework it's unclear to me how you would merge the Chinese and the Russian programs into a single major. So even if they did qualify for an exception, I don't think you could use the same solution.
And while you might want to replace those furnaces with something else, there really isn't a great way to do that. Most of them are already running and are going to need to run another 10-25 years before they're replaced in order to pay for themselves. You can't just shut them off, because then you won't have steel and you do need steel for civilization to keep running smoothly.
So what you're left with is trying to make hydrogen cheap enough to replace the coal furnaces and make it worth the extra R&D time required to get your foundry producing in-spec material with a different fuel source, which means their processes need to be better with the new fuel as well.
If that sounds like it'll take decades to happen, well yeah, you're right, probably decades to even start happening, so we need to keep mining coal, and, it'd be a very good idea to get young, bright minds involved, because the mining process is, by my estimation, ripe for automation, and if you want to directly reduce the human cost of mining in general, robots is how you do it, and that's also a goal worth pursuing given the number of people die every year digging in the dirt, not just in the United States, but worldwide.