The involvement of state agencies in program discontinuance in higher education was studied, based on the responses of 46 agencies. It was found that 32 state agencies were actively involved in recommending, initiating, or enforcing actual discontinuances. The following eight categories of obstacles to program discontinuance were identified: legal aspects, interactive issues, economic issues, political issues, definitional shortcomings, attitudinal issues, procedural issues, and environmental issues. Among the strategies that were followed to cope with obstacles to program discontinuance were the following: announcing a new era that is advertised with a slogan such as "smaller and better"; developing program discontinuance guidelines; stimulating programmatic change via trade-offs (e.g., approving new programs without allocating additional funds); assisting in developing hiring ceilings; developing standards and norms for the purpose of lending objectivity to the decision-making process; and promoting the establishment of faculty retraining centers. A coping-process model and a time-order sequence for implementation are proposed, which consists of three phases: incentives to induce reduction, general coping devices, and rewards for the effective implementation of curricular retrenchment. Additionally, roles for the institutional researcher in the closure process may include the following: assist in conceptualizing a university-level program review process in line with the institution's degree of centralization or decentralization, and identify appropriate data and estimate the cost and time involved in retrieving and interpreting them. A bibliography is appended. (SW)