America’s Interpreter Gap Widens

The closure of MIIS won’t make headlines—but it will make U.S. diplomacy slower, narrower, and less American.

In late August 2025, Middlebury College announced it would wind down the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey (MIIS) and asked enrolled students to finish by June 30, 2027. The budget math is blunt: a projected $14.1 million institutional shortfall this fiscal year, including $8.7 million tied to MIIS’s under-enrollment. (A student-paper summary also notes the trustees’ vote the prior day.) The strategic cost is larger: the United States is thinning its pipeline of U.S.-trained simultaneous interpreters in critical language pairs.