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Posted on 12/19/2020 8:35:44 AM PST by Kaslin
The enrollment and financial woes of the State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) are well known. And fixing the mess will be a monumental challenge, concludes an analysis by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.
The 14-school system’s enrollment has plunged by 21 percent from its 2010 peak of 119,513 students. But while the student census has, on net, fallen precipitously, commensurate reductions in faculty, other staffing and standalone institutions that kept costs unacceptably high were not considered.
Until recently, that is.
The terrible financial picture at PASSHE reflects two major causes, notes Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Pittsburgh think tank.
“Obviously, the drop in enrollment in the absence of reductions in overall spending over the past few years produces higher per student costs,” he writes (in Policy Brief Vol. 20, No. 43).
“The second cause has been the power of the faculty union (and no doubt other unions as well) to continue driving ever higher salaries and other compensation despite falling enrollment.”
Additionally, massive increases in obligations to retirees (outside of pensions) have driven liabilities and funding requirements sharply higher.
“Then, too, faculty unions have usurped management prerogatives in assignments, hiring and dismissals, making for more inefficiencies and higher costs,” the Ph.D. economist says.
This past July, the state General Assembly passed legislation that finally recognized the precarious situation facing PASSHE and, in particular, schools that have seen such large enrollment drops.
While the legislation empowers PASSHE’s board of governors to make dramatic changes, including mergers and consolidations of programs, it is not carte blanche permission to act without input from the stakeholders, legislators, and the affected communities.
As it now stands, a pair of mergers has been proposed – Edinboro, Clarion, and California along with the union of Lock Haven, Mansfield, and Bloomsburg.
PASSHE Chancellor Daniel Greenstein says the goal of the mergers is to share a single administration, a combined management enrollment strategy, faculty and staff and to offer common academic programs.
Which will be easier said than done, of course.
“There is already pushback from the faculty union, local community homes of the schools and from legislators,” Haulk says. “No doubt students and alumni groups will be heard from as well.”
But beyond the predictable political and emotional objections and possible legal roadblocks from unions, Haulk says there are some very real operational and cost concerns regarding underlying realities at the schools, from out-of-whack student-teacher ratios to basic academic performance, among others.
“Finally, whatever form the mergers take, it will need to consider the impacts on the eight non-merging PASSHE schools,” Haulk says. “Indeed, it might be necessary to rethink the entire system in terms of degree program offerings as well as student-faculty ratios and academic performance at the schools not involved in mergers.”
But the bottom line is that long overdue action must be taken to deal with the State System’s surging costs and tanking enrollment over the last decade.
“Perhaps other schemes for consolidation will emerge that are more palatable to the stakeholders and easier to carry out,” Haulk concludes. “Still, without doubt, the task of completing the mergers and being ready for fall 2022 is a daunting challenge given its complexities and the obstacles it will face.”
Foundations in the sand soon crumble.
Defund.
Defund the entire thing.
There is no reason university chancellors should be paid a quarter of million dollars a year. Or more.
It’s insane. And obscene.
Pennsylvania Ping!
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They just don’t get it. Yes, the high cost is unacceptable. But the value of what is received for the cost is not addressed. Apparently, it’s very expensive to get indoctrinated.
Burn them to the ground.
Why is it daunting??
Just eliminate the entire central-state public school ‘indoctrination’ complex and leave it to at-home or parental choice.
Not just Pa. but all states both higher and lower. The 1619 project is gaining steam. It is treason personified. More than 4000 schools already feature it.
........Liberalism aka socialism which has infected Higher Education nationwide will and should kill off “Higher Education” as it is known today. No more government loans!
A lot of New York and New Jersey high school graduates, especially New Jerseyians, headed to Pennsylvania for a better education than they'd get in New Jersey.
New York and New Jersey residents have been fleeing those states long before the Wuhanic Plague and it has to impact Pennsylvania college enrollments.
Used to be that the PA state colleges fit a spot between community colleges and higher cost universities. Costs were low and education was adequate for graduates to succeed in life after graduation. Didn’t have a lot of prestigious and we’ll placed alumni that could get you ahead of the line in business or politics, but if you’re going to work as a public school teacher, that’s not a draw anyway.
Then they started chasing the Joneses, focusing on endowments, rock climbing walls in the student union, progressive political sensibilities and the accountrements that staff and faculty at “nicer” colleges got.
If the towns want to keep their colleges, spin them off into private schools and see what happens. If the state system wants to get serious, which they only want to do to the extent that they’re allowed to keep going on without any more changes, they’d standardize curricula across all of the colleges and streamline all of the coursework. There’s no reason for 14 aligned colleges to have more than one intro to biology course or book. There’s no reason for an educational system with that amount of buying power to offer that course book for more than the cost of printing. The opportunities for slashing costs and eliminating redundancies are everywhere... Yet they’re not even attempted.
Get rid of the faculty union that forces the state universities to pay salaries and benefits far exceeding other universities.
I was a professor at one of their universities for quite a few years and got paid far too much. Often joked that after that I never wanted a real job.
I was full time. That meant 10 hrs per week teaching, 28 weeks per year. My office hours were between classes. Most years I only taught classes Tues. and Thurs. Month off at Christmas, week at Thanksgiving and Easter. Off from first week in May through the end of August.
Real rough job... LOL
And zero pressure to do research or publish.
I was on several search & screen committees to hire new faculty. The union pay scale, while super high for social arts faculty was low in the business, computer and science areas.
End result, the only faculty you could hire with the credentials required for accreditation were the losers rejected for tenure at many other universities.
Many years ago professors wrote textbooks, requiring their students to purchase them. This was a way to continue keeping the money rolling in. I’m not even sure students get hard copy textbooks anymore but if they do, professor authors would be a difficult hurdle to overcome.
At this point, you have the best case made for homeschooling when public schooling is likely to make your kid fall behind for their age.
You still pay plenty for digital texts.
why? it needs to be purged and rebuilt form the ground up with American values and pride
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