Scary article about the state of public higher education in PA

Farther, faster…
https://chancellorgreenstein.blogspot.com/2020/02/farther-faster.html

Interesting post. It was a bit refreshing to see them accept some responsibility for the fiscal responsibility - that enrollment is down 20% while full time faculty has only declined 7%. Definitely more of a political piece than a factual assessment though, as he artfully dodges some serious points to deflect blame from the system, continuing to blame the state for lack of funding.

How in the world do you deny incompetence, while admitting years of financial mismanagement and inaction? While I agree that the SNHU development may not signal the end of brick and mortar schools, the overall trend is undeniable and is a force with which they must increasingly contend. When an upstart competitor in my field scores with one of my customers, you do not roll your eyes and comfort yourself with excuses from your position of past success - you pay attention and adapt to survive.

@chmcnm I somewhat agree with your view regarding the “field of dreams” mentality, although I wonder if that isn’t a bit charitable. I’ve heard of a practice in the govt world, where administrators spend and expand their presence as much as possible, in an effort to become an eventual immovable object, or in a sense, too big to fail. Then, in the future, when cuts have to be made, your entity will be spared since it is new, or too expensive (or too much debt) to enable a complete closure. I won’t go so far as to make that claim, but it is a possibility.

With that in mind, I come back to the Chancellors comments, where he is ruling out any sort of closure. This makes no sense, given the true statistics of PASSHE. He mentions a 20% enrollment reduction, but if you remove the 2 strongest schools, and include this years enrollment, it’s more like 35%. Some schools are at 50% reduction. Schools like Cheney, Mansfield and Edinboro have serious capacity issues. You could close all 3, send the students to other system schools, and those schools would still be well healthy enrollment levels. I’d like to hear the plan to making drastic financial improvement while somehow keeping all 14 schools. To me, it’s just a well crafted statement, intending to sound like bold change, but still more focused on maintaining the system than attacking the goal affordable higher education with a plan to win.

That’s bcos this state system* has goal/mission conflict. On the one hand, its “affordable higher education.” But beyond that, the state uses the colleges as a jobs program for local communities. With a rapidly growing population, those two ideals work well. But now that at the student growth is negative, affordable education and a jobs program are in major conflict. Thus, the state will have to come to grips with those costs, unrelated to higher education. That is no easy feat for politicians, or even parents on cc who are empathetic to their local communities.

State System of Higher Education votes for a second consecutive year to freeze tuition

https://www.passhe.edu/News/Pages/Releases.aspx?q=2020-04-29-tuition-freeze

Looks like PA is about to get crushed…not just PASSHE but all of the tiny schools…Dickinson, W&J…crazy times.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot??

There’s a lots of nice schools in PA. What a shame.

Yes, it’s the fact that there are lots of them that’s the problem.