Have any D-2 or D-3 schools cut XC and/or T&F programs?

D2/3 definitely pay much less on travel. The scholarship money is not really that big of a deal but the fact that d2/3 schools have a huge boost of overall enrollment due to track is very important to them... a large d1 school with 50/100 kids on a track team spends a ton of money on those kids but they don’t really help the school in overall enrollment. A small d2/3 school with 1,000-4,000 students that has 50/100 kids on the team means they are in some cases close to 10% of the student body, that is 10% of the student body that wouldn’t attend that school without track/xc. At large d1 school even if they have few scholarships and a roster of 100 students that is barely a drop in the enrollment bucket at a school with 30,000-50,000 overall students.

d3 is safe wrote:

D2/3 definitely pay much less on travel. The scholarship money is not really that big of a deal but the fact that d2/3 schools have a huge boost of overall enrollment due to track is very important to them... a large d1 school with 50/100 kids on a track team spends a ton of money on those kids but they don’t really help the school in overall enrollment. A small d2/3 school with 1,000-4,000 students that has 50/100 kids on the team means they are in some cases close to 10% of the student body, that is 10% of the student body that wouldn’t attend that school without track/xc. At large d1 school even if they have few scholarships and a roster of 100 students that is barely a drop in the enrollment bucket at a school with 30,000-50,000 overall students.

To add what might be obvious is those athletes pay a lot of their own way so it helps enrollment considerably. The number of D3 schools that added football over the past decade is pretty remarkable. A lot of guys still want to play college football and D3 let's them do so (and say they did). I remember meeting a guy who bragged about playing college football (he was maybe 28) at the time. He seemed not all that athletic and so I asked where he played and it was some D3 school. Cool that he got to play at a program that would probably not beat a state champion team from FL, GA or TX.

Salem State in Massachusetts is in D3. I don't believe they ever had a track team but they had cross country not that long ago. It's gone now. In D 2, Clarion in Pennsylvania got rid of cross country and track for men several years ago as did Pitt Johnstown though UPJ brought both sports back. Lock Haven decided to drop both sports a few years back but the campaign to keep the sports was successful.

As others have pointed out, sports play a different role at small schools who struggle to attract applicants than at schools who have more applicants than they need. This can even be true in D1. My dad's alma mater, St. Francis, Pa., dropped football around the time he graduated. They brought it back around 1980 (or something like that) and are in D1AA because they wanted applicants and found that they'd get 40-50 more male ones, guys who had played in high school and wanted to play in college but weren't good enough to get scholarship offers, every year if they had a football team.