(05-06-2021 08:41 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (05-06-2021 05:58 AM)The Cutter of Bish Wrote: Perhaps the most damaging truth kernel:
Quote: But Schweyer, the Lehigh County Democrat, worried that the cure may cause more harm.
“Chancellor, you said a number of your … schools are failing. Why would anybody choose them today? Why would anybody choose them after a consolidation? I wouldn’t.”
But, what infuriates me as a PA resident is how this plan gets so heavily criticized, but the school that really needs to just be shut down yesterday is kept out of this. And you don’t see an alternative coming from that side.
So Cheyney keeps going, and West Chester keeps paying for all of them. And PSU keeps getting money to go after the same kind of kids who would go to the state schools to fill up PSU branch campuses, who are neglected and under-resourced themselves. This state sucks.
The legislator does make a cogent point in connection with the larger picture: when has a high school student ever chosen a college because of an administrative restructuring? I doubt that has crossed the minds of nearly anyone actually applying to college. Now, students may very well have a fear of a college closing down and need the confidence that won't happen while they're attending, so that's a byproduct of an administrative restructuring. However, no one chooses a school simply based on a top-level restructuring in and of itself.
I'm not a PA resident, so I'm curious about the perception and use of the PSU Commonwealth campuses. On paper, the PSU branch system would seem to address three needs: (1) providing local regional colleges across a geographically dispersed state, (2) having a direct path to the main PSU flagship campus, which is an advantage that a non-PSU regional campus doesn't have, and (3) providing a release valve to surging demand for freshman admissions to the main PSU campus (which is an issue that is happening at a lot of flagship universities).
I don't know if it works as well as intended, but at least on paper, that system seems to make more sense for today's world (where we're seeing a "flight to quality" in higher education) compared to the separate silos between flagships and regional directional schools that most other states have. So, if I'm a PA legislator, it actually makes sense that I'd rather allocate more money to that type of PSU branch system (which has the carrot of a higher value PSU flagship degree at the end) compared to propping up other universities that wouldn't realistically attract more enrollment no matter how many dollars were thrown at them.
However, as I've said, I'm not a PA resident, so I don't know if it actually works that well in practice.
Your thought process is very logical and would make perfect sense if Pennsylvania followed a traditional template. Unfortunately, it does not, which makes this whole issue so complicated.
Penn State and Pitt, as well as Temple and Lincoln, are all state-affiliated institutions but none of them are state universities in the more traditional sense.
Think of them as sort of quasi state schools, because that is basically what they are. It all goes back to whenever they were creating a state lien system back in the 60s. Pitt, for example, was a fully private institution until the late 1960s.
Personally, I have long believed this needs to change because it does not serve the students of the Commonwealth very well. The above, especially Penn State and Pitt are outstanding schools. Anyone who attends them is getting a prestigious degree and more importantly a degree that is recognized as valuable throughout the region.
However, they also offer some of the most expensive in-state tuition in the country.
Students who are not quite in the top echelon or whose families don’t have those means have always had the opportunity to go to the state schools like, for example, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock, IUP, Millersburg, etc.
However, as Pitt and especially Penn State have grown their branch campuses, it has really crushed a lot of those smaller state schools for all the reasons outlined in this thread.
I cannot understand why the state legislature has allowed this to happen to their actual state run universities? They’re basically letting these semi-private institutions run their public universities out of business.
This is not to suggest that a re-organization would not be in order anyway. Population decline has rendered the need for 21 state schools — or whatever it is — moot. Pennsylvania doesn’t need that many state-run universities anymore. A consolidation has long needed to occur.
However, in that same vein, you can’t keep pouring money into Penn State to grow its branch campuses to run the existing schools out of business. Or, you can do that in consolidate the entire operation. However, then, the commonwealth needs to come in and run the University to regulate standards, control costs, etc. – which is never going to happen.
Allowing all of these state run universities to whether on the vine while Penn State is regularly Garden and propped up is not good for the majority of the families in the Commonwealth. They are ending up getting the same education at these branch schools but at a considerably higher cost.
Who is benefiting from that? Certainly not Pennsylvania families.
I think looking at this issue and blaming it on Cheney or Clarion or Bloomsburg or whomever is really missing the broader point. Pennsylvania has basically allowed Pitt and especially Penn State to develop systems that compete with their own system and with population decline that has created a resource scarcity that ultimately hurts everyone. Those smaller schools that are hurting right now or a symptom of a much larger issue that will soon impact larger schools.
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Consolidation of Pennsylvania Public Universities
