Most of our online subscriptions were originally print subscriptions, when that was all that we had - about 515 titles.   Faculty would recommend what they considered to be core titles and we tried to make our collection as robust as possible.   When those titles became available online, we just moved them over.  However, in addition to these individual subscriptions we obtained packages and databases over the years which provide much broader coverage than we ever could have imagined 20 years ago - approximately 40,000 titles.

So the argument that I am making is that we may want to cancel this one journal in your subject area, but we are offering you 100 or 1000 or (fill in the blank) other titles that provide similar coverage.   We just will not have that one journal.  Except for some titles that accrediting agencies recommend (as was mentioned in an earlier post), this seems to make sense to most people.  This may not work for every library, but for an institution that primarily serves undergraduates it may be the way to go.