Oct 29, 2017 4 min read

“We’re number three! We’re number three!”

That’s not a rallying cry you frequently hear, but when it comes to higher education in Pennsylvania, the commonwealth is in third place in two unfortunate ways.

First, we rank third-from-the-bottom in per-capita dollar subsidies to higher education. What this means is that lawmakers in other states recognize the value their public universities provide to their economies and quality of life, and put forth appropriations for them that might approach some level of adequacy (even if, in fairness, those appropriations have been dropping in other states and not just Pennsylvania). This leaves students to cover more of the cost of their own tuition, saddling them with debt for years after they receive their degrees, and consequently delaying their purchase of homes and cars and the start of their own families. Sure, some twenty-and-thirtysomethings might be lingering at mom and dad’s because the rent is free and the refrigerator is always well-stocked, but some are there because they owe more than the cost of an average house and have no other alternative.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a recent study by the College Board found that Pennsylvania public universities are the third most-expensive in the nation, trailing only Vermont and New Hampshire.

That higher education in the commonwealth is beset by woes is not a new development. Penn State University and its hallowed football program endured a hard reckoning earlier this decade as a result of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, and its fraternities and sororities have come under scrutiny following the alcohol-related death of a pledge earlier this year. At the same time, the State System of Higher Education and its 14 universities have been steadily losing enrollment.

The news in recent days has, alas, been less than uplifting.

An annual glimpse at enrollment in State System institutions, which includes California University of Pennsylvania in the Mon Valley, found that overall enrollment has declined by 2 percent in the last year. While Cal U. experienced a 3 percent uptick, most of the other universities continued to have fewer students coming to their campuses. Some of the drop-off can be credited to demographic changes, as there are fewer college-age young people in Pennsylvania as there once were, but some of it can pegged to tuition increases that have put attendance increasingly out of reach for students who would have otherwise been drawn by the affordability of campuses like Cal U., Edinboro, Indiana and Mansfield universities.

The State System has been exploring ways to meet its challenges, such as consolidating programs and sharing administrative functions. An observation from Franklin Roosevelt seems like a wise one for the State System to follow at this point: “One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment. If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.”

Meanwhile, the budgets of Pennsylvania’s state-related institutions had been thrown into uncertainty as a result of the budget battle in Harrisburg. Mid-year tuition hikes were threatened before Gov. Tom Wolf signed a bill Friday providing Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple and Lincoln universities with $600 million in funding.

The seemingly perennial budget battles in Harrisburg are not good for Pennsylvania’s image in the here and now, and shortchanging higher education will only hurt it in the long term. Ron Cowell of the Education Policy and Leadership Center in Harrisburg recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that funding skirmishes over state colleges and universities could cause big employers like Amazon to look elsewhere.

“They’ve got to be looking at how Pennsylvania treats or mistreats higher education as a public asset,” he said.

We should be looking at it, too, and holding our legislators to account.