Vesting in our collective success: Turning our minds to the future

Blogging has been on my mind for months, only the signal wasn’t getting to my fingers. Recent events transpired to change that. Perhaps it is the appearance of Sirius in the Canis Major constellation and the resulting onset of the dog days of summer. Perhaps it was the recent vote by the Board of Governors freezing tuition for an unprecedented fifth year in a row. Whatever, Clio is mercurial.     

At last, though, two topics: the first looks back on the year past with heartfelt gratitude, the second forward.    

The state budget passed by the House and Senate includes a 6% increase in PASSHE’s general fund appropriation, and the governor has indicated his intention to sign the bill. The investment enables the Board to freeze tuition, and it includes targeted support that will help to alleviate PennWest University’s legacy debt – a burden that produces a structural deficit beyond the university’s means to manage without risking service to its students and to students elsewhere across the commonwealth.     

We are grateful to the governor and the General Assembly, including legislative and committee leadership, as well as the House PASSHE Caucus. We are grateful to the elected officials who serve on PASSHE’s Board of Governors, representing their respective legislative caucuses. All were willing to roll up their sleeves and problem-solve with us about how best to ensure that affordable higher education pathways persist across the commonwealth’s state-owned universities. Their work and bipartisan commitment was critically important and reflects the power and continuing promise of our democratic form of government.    

There is no “I” in advocacy – it is a team sport. Accordingly, I was honored with colleagues at the Chancellor’s Office to support a team that included only the most exceptional “athletes” – our colleagues from APSCUF and AFSCME, our university presidents, and with and through them many of our trustees, a group of campus-based public relations professionals and, of course, our Board of Governors.     

Working closely together, we achieved clearly articulated, shared objectives. Forgive a “Dannerism,” but our advocacy efforts this year and last represent the very best of “systemness.” They utilized distinctive strengths distributed across our great System to achieve effects beyond the means of any one of our universities or constituencies to achieve on its own. 

Hold that thought while I address another topic, also in the vein of looking back and giving heartfelt thanks.    

From time to time, our Board of Governors hosts workshops exploring opportunities and challenges confronting our universities, faculty and students, and industry. Last week, we heard a presentation about work underway at PennWest, which is building one of only two universities created in Pennsylvania in the 21st century. (The other, you won’t be surprised, to learn, is our very own Commonwealth University.) Viewed through any perspective lens, PennWest is an inspiring turnaround story about grit and determination, a people’s commitment to mission, compassionate and focused leadership at every level across the organization, shared governance, identity, and re-imagining what a 21st-century university can and ought to be for its students, employees, and region. Interim President Bernotsky – who was joined by Edinboro’s APSCUF chapter president Dr. Sam Claster – told the story to the Board. It is not a new story to members of the PennWest community, who have lived it and shared in its making. But it was new to the Board and other workshop invitees, including university trustees and leaders of our collective bargaining units. Beyond the tremendous progress that is evident and the optimism and confidence it inspired about PennWest’s future, we learned a great deal about what it takes from all concerned to build a new university while operating an existing one, to fashion new identities – even cultures – while honoring inherited ones, to overcome tremendous obstacles, many of them structural, others unwittingly self-imposed, to work together toward the greater good of our students.    

I have worked in and around higher education for my entire professional life – nearly 40 years. I have never encountered such a selfless, intensely collaborative approach to problem-solving at enterprise – actually, existential – scale. Nor have I been as moved as much as I have been by colleagues at PennWest – by their tales from the front line about renaissance and re-invigoration, and about the most profound kinds of fatigue. I have visited PennWest multiple times, spent countless hours with community members in conference rooms, on Zoom and on phone calls. I am routinely humbled by my colleagues’ tenacity, compassion, and commitment. They all are writing a story that deserves to be told over and over again.     

While the good people of California, Clarion, and Edinboro are squarely at the center of this story, others featured in it and they also deserve and have my thanks. Staff who are on loan from West Chester University and the Chancellor’s Office have extensively supported PennWest’s tremendous advancement. And PennWest is supported generally by its sister PASSHE universities. They threw themselves behind an advocacy effort that put PennWest’s needs – notably for debt assumption – above their own and invested in real, measurable, and tangible ways in PennWest’s success. Both are tremendous acts of “systemness.”     

You don’t see that kind of thing very often in our industry. Collaboration is rife across higher education, but it typically engages individuals and groups who work together in areas where they are already aligned – evaluating new approaches to student success, sharing existing online courses, bringing like minds together to advance the benefits of the general education curriculum, working together in procurement to achieve better pricing.     

At PASSHE, we are experiencing what I will call “deep resource sharing” – where partners work together, committed to the success of the whole, sometimes foregoing their own needs in support of the common good. Throughout the entire campaign – and yes, it was a campaign – we saw the System come together like never before. Sure, there was a voice or two grousing – as there always are – from the parochial and predictable dark corners that refuse to come into the light and see that we are one system – with one bank account – and that helping stabilize one university now means helping everyone in the long-run. I was overwhelmed by the support and concern that the vast majority in our System has shown and its willingness to wrap arms around and stand shoulder to shoulder with PennWest, ensuring affordable, public higher education options exist for all.    

In looking forward, I’m conscious of completing my first tour of duty for the State System in the coming weeks and embarking on my second. I am grateful to and humbled by the Board for the confidence it has demonstrated in me by renewing my appointment. Upon reflection, a couple of themes spring to mind and are worth sharing. The first – and this should in no way minimize my gratitude to the governor and General Assembly for their support of their state-owned universities – a 6% increase in our state appropriation is fantastic. When coupled with a tuition freeze, though, it nets a 2% increase in our total revenues in a year when cost increases still exceed 3%. Put another way, to keep pace with inflation we require $64M in additional resources over and above what we had budgeted for last fall. We have netted $33M. To wit, in 2023-24 we are $31M short of anticipated cost increases not including increased labor costs (estimated last fall at 2%).

What does that mean? To me, it means two things. First, we will need to continue making difficult trade-off decisions. Such decisions are ultimately in the hands of university leadership working to accomplish their goals within the policy environment and operational parameters established by the Board of Governors. I expect those difficult decisions will be taken after consultation with key stakeholders and communicated effectively in a timely manner. I do not expect that difficult decisions will be the product of or reflect consensus. It’s great where that happens, but by their very nature, such decisions are rarely reached in a consensual manner.

Second, it means that we need to double down on growth. I’ve written about this extensively over the past several years, in part because growth is the long-term goal of our System Redesign. (The short-term one is financial stabilization across the System – something that we are closer to today than at any time in the recent past.) Growth is critical. The state requires us to grow. Today, 60% of all jobs in Pennsylvania require someone with some postsecondary education – credentials that only 51% of Pennsylvanians have. And the greatest demand is for people with B.A. and M.A. degrees in areas where we are strongest: business, healthcare, STEM, education, and public services. If you look at the number of credentials we’ve produced in those areas, we have been stable, maybe even grown a tad since 2010, when overall enrollments declined by nearly a third. Additionally, Pennsylvanians need us to grow. Postsecondary education is still the most reliable pathway into and beyond the middle class. Indeed, postsecondary attainment levels track directly with higher incomes and less exposure to unemployment as well as a variety of desirable health and other outcomes.    

There are two ways to grow. Enroll more students and grow the proportion of enrolled students who complete. We need to do both. As I keep saying any chance I get, where else will Pennsylvania get its nurses, its teachers, its business leaders, its science and public service professionals? How else does Pennsylvania fuel its Main Street economies?       

Growth is also imperative to address our financial challenges in a lasting way. As a wise and close-in advisor once told me, “Austerity is not a strategy.” Yes, of course, we should advocate for increased support from our owners. We have, we do, we shall. And we are making progress – so much so that we have held tuition flat for six years while at the same time more than doubling the amount universities make available to their students in the form of institutional aid. Our general fund appropriation has increased by 25% since 2018-19, and the level of state funding per student FTE is currently $7,674, which in inflation-adjusted dollars, is equivalent to per student funding reached in 2003-04. Great.     

But we must also be more aggressive in growing enrollment. So, I can’t help wondering what we could accomplish in enrollments if we work together there as effectively as we have worked these past few years in advocacy and supporting PennWest? What does working together mean in this new context? To me, it means vesting in our collective success at the university level first and foremost, because that is where students are – that is where they go. And yes, of course, there are System roles, and we should explore those, too.     

In my first weeks here almost five years ago, I had three conversations – two in person, one by email – that frankly surprised me. All offered explanations for the System’s already protracted experience of declining enrollments. One proffered that we’d have better retention and graduation rates if the administration enrolled better students (and there was I naively thinking we were privileged to work as public universities helping Pennsylvanians of all backgrounds realize their fullest potential). Another laid blame upon faculty for not engaging as effectively as they might with students we enrolled. (Call me old-fashioned, but I never believed that asking folks to just “do better” was an effective approach to continuous professional development or organizational performance improvement.) A third extolled the value of gateway courses, because they weeded out students who didn’t “belong” in college. (Silly me, I guess I believe in the profoundly democratic impulses of public regional universities and the thrust of the completion movement that swept over them two decades ago.)   

I’ve heard these memes before. It’s not as if they are unknown or unspoken in our industry and our sector. So rather than responding (not a strength – sitting on my hands), I focused my attention on other more pervasive (thank goodness) and more inspiring conversations that are truer reflections of our character and culture. Thus, as examples I remember and remember being profoundly proud of:     

• A conversation at Slippery Rock with a group of faculty and staff who informed me with heads nodding all ‘round that enrollment management gets prospective students onto campus where “faculty close the deal.” 
• A tour of West Chester’s Moon Shot for Equity Initiative, which represents a coordinated, analytically driven, all-hands approach to improving outcomes for academically at-risk students.  
• A deep dive into how science students’ faculty-led research experiences at Lock Haven parlay faculty passions for both discipline and students into a profoundly effective tool for improving student engagement and success.   
• A morning with Mansfield’s Public Safety Training Institute, where faculty and administration work closely with regional employers and others to design and deliver scarce safety and emergency response certifications. The institute is at once addressing employer and regional needs, creating robust pathways into meaningful careers while contributing significantly to enrollment.  
• Our journey with Cheyney, which has demonstrated that you can “shrink to grow.”    

And then, of course, there’s PennWest, where the all-hands approach to enrollment management this past year is, touch wood, delivering far better than expected outcomes with new and returning students for Fall 2023. 

More demonstrable evidence that yes, we can – when we turn our minds to it. To that end, on the eve of my second tour of duty, I invite a conversation about what more we can do together to meet the state’s pressing workforce development needs, to serve our regions and employers even better, and – yes – to grow. Let’s begin with aspiration, if we can, not with constraint. I’m happy to discuss constraints, of course. It’s just that after five years, I’ve not encountered one constraint that was materially beyond our ability to relax if we chose. At least in my experience, our most oft-cited constraints are also of our own constructs.    

Let’s have a discussion about university and system approaches, and let’s be ambitious in our aspirations and reach. How do we work together to achieve growth? Can we offer material incentives or rewards to individuals or groups? Are there process changes or approaches we should consider that create safe places to try and sometimes fail? What can we do to increase the clock speed of our efforts (because with speculative ventures, it is better to know sooner rather than later, when we have expended fewer rather than more resources, about the likelihood of success)? How do we fund the journey? Do we hold out and wait for new money, risking being left behind by other universities and colleges that are also thinking as hard as we are about how to grow, or do we factor innovation for growth into already complex trade-off discussions? How do we articulate to prospective students the value proposition of attending a State System university? A recently published report shows we are known for being relatively affordable – indeed, that affordability is our most vital “selling point” to prospective students. Are there other selling points into which we ought to be leaning harder? What more can we do to raise our retention and graduation rates, engage our students, and make their experiences “stickier”? Presently, our student retention and graduation rates are average when compared to our like universities nationally. Call me biased, but in my view, we are anything but average. We are nothing short of extraordinary.     

Onward. 

Purposeful Action

As a system of public universities, we have worked intently over the past four years to foster greater transparency, understanding, and confidence in our financial planning and reporting efforts. Today we have a multi-year comprehensive planning process (CPP) that provides a constant two- and three-year glimpse into what lies ahead. That has been a remarkably useful tool, but from time to time it is important for us to lift our eyes to the horizon and look even further down the road.

At the Feb. 15 Board of Governors workshop, we reviewed financial planning scenarios that run out to 2030. Extrapolating from university CPPs and grounded in our System Redesign priorities, the forecasting exercise can inform Board decisions and its ongoing evaluation of System progress.

As background for that conversation, I am circulating to you this summary of trends that will shape U.S. higher education in the years ahead, with links for those wanting to know more. To be clear, these trends will create headwinds. They also will create opportunities that smart institutions will take advantage of – strengthening themselves as engines of economic development and social mobility, expanding student and employee headcount, and securing themselves financially.

State System universities are well positioned in this regard, although our work will require purposeful attention to the continued evolution of educational and business models.

Let’s dig in.

SUMMARY OF U.S. HIGHER ED TRENDS:

TREND 1: Enrollment in U.S. higher education will remain under pressure.

University and college enrollments will continue to shrink in most regions, with less selective public four-year universities (like System universities) and community colleges losing the most ground. The high school leaving population – our traditional market – will contract by about 10% in Pennsylvania in the 10 years after 2026. The growing skepticism about the value of higher education won’t help. It reflects a variety of concerns having to do with the cost of a postsecondary education and the return available from that investment, notably in graduates’ earning power. There is a political dimension to the phenomenon – some are more skeptical than others – but the trend lines are nonetheless unfavorable for all, irrespective of political identity.

Also adding pressure on college enrollments are:

• Employers who look beyond degrees as a measure of employee competency (this “emerging degree reset” is gaining ground and sweeping up large employers including Apple, Google, and IBM, and the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Utah).
• Aggressive competition from public universities and systems that give in-state tuition to residents of contiguous states (a means by which SUNY doubled its applications for Fall 2023).

TREND 2: Institutions will compete hard along a few axes to counter declining enrollments.

1. Preserving/growing their share of a shrinking traditional market

A key to surviving the enrollment bust involves retaining and graduating more of the students that an institution enrolls. The greatest opportunities may exist for less selective universities, provided they can evolve and adopt pedagogical and student support practices that demonstrably engage students most effectively. PASSHE universities are ploughing this field hard and making progress thanks to a raft of innovations in both classroom and non-classroom settings, and thanks to the creativity and commitment of our faculty and staff. That work needs to continue, broaden, and ultimately accelerate. It may benefit significantly from formal employee professional development. A recent study of faculty professional development offered by the Association of College and University Educators found solid evidence of its positive impacts measured in terms of student course completion rates and learning outcomes, and a five-fold return on training investment.

2. Expanding degree completion programs for adult students with some college and no degree

In Pennsylvania, a million people over the age of 25 have some college but no degree. (There are 35-40 million nationwide.) Not all want to complete their degree, but some do – enough to spawn aggressive competition in degree-completion programs. Programs that award credit for prior learning and make educational, student support, and business and administrative functions available outside normal business hours are positioned well, along with those that offer remote learning options and adult-tailored supports (e.g., child care, as well as financial aid, career, academic, and other kinds of advising).

Recruiting, enrolling, and educating adults is something we do – adults account for about 12% of our student body, compared to 37% of the student body nationally. Scale requires evolution of our business, administrative, educational, and support functions in ways that advantage adult students and compete effectively with other institutions seeking to serve them.

3. Expanding availability of ‘non-degree credentials’ (NDCs)

As we will hear from two leading experts during our workshop on Feb. 15, the credentialing world is complicated. There are over a million unique credentials awarded by academic and non-academic providers. About a third of them are degrees (associate, bachelor’s, etc.) and certificates awarded by the nation’s 11,000 postsecondary providers – 4,300 of them eligible for Federal Title IV funding. The rest are available as certificates, badges, licenses, and other credentials from more than 50,000 providers.

Further, by any measure, the number of non-degree credentials (NDCs) produced each year now dwarfs the number of degrees produced. Driving growth are the cost of college degrees and skepticism about their value, employer willingness to use other measures of employee competence, and accelerating change in the world of work, which requires that earners constantly re-skill and up-skill in order to remain relevant in the job market. While media attention focuses more on non-traditional providers like LinkedIn and Coursera, universities and colleges are moving into this arena by offering NDCs to:

Degree-seeking students for competencies earned by completing credit-bearing courses (e.g., Credly badges awarded by ESU).

Non-degree students who are seeking specific industry-recognized skills, like those available at IUP’s Academy of Culinary Arts or in certificates available from Mansfield’s Public Safety Training Institute, for example.

Employees at partner organizations to which universities provide bespoke training. PASSHE universities offer more than 300 NDCs, but not at scale. Scaling up requires:

• A credential registry – that is, a catalog of all the credentials we offer, degrees and non- degrees alike, and a strategy for expanding their number in a focused way, including by identifying credentials that can be made available to students by completing existing courses.
• Marketing and student recruitment campaigns that leverage a growing catalog of NDCs and student-facing systems appropriate for non-degree students.
• More (and more intensive) employer partnerships that build demand for NDCs, including through internships and tuition-assistance programs.
• Expansion in credits made available for prior learning, including for NDCs.
• A business model that supports competitive pricing in the non-degree market.

4. Emphasizing credentialing pathways over degrees

Lifelong learning has become an imperative. It is no longer reasonable to assume that someone can amass in a few years the full range of skills and competencies they need to participate effectively in the 21st-century economy. And yet, that assumption is what higher education degree structures and business models are largely built upon (see Carey, The End of College and Craig, A New U).

Credentialing pathways offer a solution. Pursuing them, working learners move back and forth between higher education and the workforce, acquiring credentials as they go and “stacking” them so that some of the credits earned count toward the award of the next credential(s).

Nursing pathways (depicted below) are commonplace, defined and largely standardized by professional accreditors operating in tandem with employers. Such pathways are being built for other industries by educators and employers working in partnership to define competencies required for critical industry roles, translating those competencies into credentials, and then offering credentials to students in ways that enable students to “stack” them just as nurses do as they build their careers.

PASSHE universities have experience in this regard. They partner, for example, in #Prepared4PA – an initiative that pairs education providers with employers in six major Pennsylvania industries to do the credential design and development work referenced above. Scale will build on work supporting adult degree-completion programs and the delivery of non- degree credentials. And it will require that State System universities use the aforementioned credential registry to show existing and prospective students how the degree and non-degree credentials that are available interact with one another and with those available from other providers to create career pathways.

 

5. Engaging even more aggressively with technology

A dozen years ago, technology was seen as a means of reaching into new markets. Today, it also promises improved student outcomes.

• Technology use in growing new markets is evident at:

• “Mega” universities that now enroll over 120,000 students annually (e.g., Southern New Hampshire, Grand Canyon, Liberty, Western Governors, and Arizona State universities); and
• Universities and systems trying to break (late) into a crowded market for fully online degrees by acquiring for-profit providers (e.g., Purdue’s acquiring Kaplan), investing significantly in home-grown capability (e.g., UNC System’s $92M investment) or in partnership with online program managers that support fully online programs on the basis of revenue-sharing and/or fee-for-service models.

• Technology use improving student outcomes is apparent in growth in the “adaptive courseware” market (think super-smart digital textbooks that adapt themselves to each user’s learning needs) and applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence (think “smart” technologies that mine vast wells of data and use other means to guide supports offered to students to assist in their educational journey). The vigorous debate about uses in higher education of ChatGPT (think super intelligent AI-driven authoring agent – yup, it will write your essays) is particularly illuminating in this regard.

PASSHE universities are fully used to technology adoption and adaptation. We’ve been doing it for decades. And we’ve learned that success requires employee professional development – something that can be in short supply for institutions experiencing enrollment declines and resulting financial pressures.

THE ROAD AHEAD

I have every confidence that PASSHE universities can translate headwinds into opportunity in these and other ways. I also believe we won’t be successful unless we are purposeful and aligned in our approach. So, in the interest of our expanding that alignment (and transparency), I offer four caveats:

1. We are not alone in considering the opportunities presented above. That’s a comfort. Our redesign priorities are now within the mainstream of contemporary higher education. It is also concerning. Competitors to whom we have lost market share since 2010 are not standing still.

2. We can’t assume our talented, mission-driven faculty and staff will simply figure out how to find, enroll, and graduate adult students, build and help students of all backgrounds navigate complicated lifelong learning pathways, and/or deploy the latest generation of technology to greatest effect. Adequately resourced investment in people, systems, processes, and practices will be critical.

3. We need to strike a balance in our portfolio of offerings – for example, between on- ground and online learning, degree and non-degree pathways, adult and traditional students. Balance builds resilience against further, future changes in one or another parts of the higher education marketplace. It also allows us to explore innovations deliberately, developing the necessary competencies over time with constant attention to indicators that help us determine where we might need to course correct.

4. We will need to attend to budgetary realities, even where we don’t like them. Two aspects here:

a. State support: I understand arguments that suggest we are letting our owners, the state, off the hook by living within our means and making the trade-offs in class size or program scope, for example. Better, it is said, to hold fast and demand more, and to heap the evidentiary basis of our demands on our owners, who are third worst in the nation in their support of a public higher education that delivers good and tangible results. While I agree with the need for aggressive and analytically driven advocacy, I struggle with the idea of digging in and waiting for the investment we sorely need. Our operating margins are thin at best, which means we don’t have a lot of time to wait. More worryingly, the students and employers and communities in our midst need our help now.

b. Use of existing resources: They will be the principle means of support for new endeavors. Here’s why: For nearly 60 years after World War II, funding flows into U.S. higher education allowed it to evolve additively – building new without dialing back much on existing. Even when per-student state funding came under pressure in the 1990s, overall revenue followed enrollments, both of which grew. All that changed when enrollments began to decline (for PASSHE, a dozen or so years ago). While there will always be opportunity to support innovation with new dollars, more reliable and lasting investment will come through the choices we make about how existing dollars are used – what scope of operations, programmatically and otherwise, we maintain while investing in the new.

The emphasis on choice requires a fundamental shift in mindset that operates at all levels – one that is neither comfortable nor easy to make. At the same time, the cost of not making this shift is real. It entails tying us to models of and markets for higher education that are declining in size and public trust and enthusiasm. As ever, choices matter, and thankfully, right now the choices are ours to make.

Congratulations to all graduates

Last week I had the honor of participating in Harrisburg Area Community College’s fall graduation, watching with pride and admiration as 450 HACC students “walked” to receive their degrees.

Graduations are the proudest moment for any educator – including this one. HACC President John “Ski” Sygielski – a great colleague, thought-partner and friend – led the ceremony with his usual compassion, humor, and grace. Toward the start, he reeled off a number of characteristics about the graduating class arrayed in front of him, each demonstrating the strength and significance of our nation’s community colleges: the proportion of first-generation college goers (high), the proportion of students with children (higher), the proportion of students who had graduated from high school more than 10 years ago (by far the highest).

Associate professor Jody Newcomer, a member of the HACC faculty, spoke movingly about students’ stories, focusing on those that demonstrated how members of the HACC community – students, faculty, and staff – helped aspiring graduates cross the finish line despite countless difficulties they encountered along the way. “Hand on your back,” as we cyclists say.

You can imagine the ceremony. As graduates’ names were announced, they walked in front of the podium, receiving their degrees to loud and rapturous applause and the occasional shouts of “That’s my mom!” or “Love you, brother!”

When I reflect on the mission of public higher education institutions, I look to universities like ours and our partners in the community colleges and think: God bless this corner of public higher education (a corner which, by the way, enrolls about three quarters of the nation’s students today) and the opportunities it creates for all as the most reliable bridge to opportunity, a sustaining career, a better life, a healthier society. God bless the communities they foster, the faculty and staff who are passionate about a mission that is too compellingly democratic to ignore, who are devoted to students, to changing lives – even saving some.

The challenges we face – that our students face – are washed away for that one, delightful, restorative, celebratory moment that is graduation.

And God bless the students who graduated this month from the 10 great universities that make up our State System and the wonderful faculty and staff who helped them to cross the finish line. Yours has been an incredible journey – navigating the usual difficulties associated with degree attainment in higher education, compounded by the disruption and uncertainty resulting from global pandemic and, for some, the challenges of fundamental organizational change.

You have accomplished what few people do, and in extraordinary circumstances. I know a bunch of you personally. We grew up together within this System, starting more or less at the same time just over four years ago, interacting with one another over the years when I was privileged to attend your gatherings or meet with you during my semesterly face-to-face and virtual campus visits.

I wish all of you well as you turn the page and pursue the next chapter. The story that will unfold for you there will be filled with opportunity, purpose, and joy.

There will be challenges, too. Life is full of them. But I believe you are well equipped to overcome with the skills you have built pursuing your degree: grit, determination, resilience, an ability to communicate and engage effectively with people of all ages and backgrounds, to problem-solve, innovate, hunker down, and do. I hope you will take a moment to celebrate what is really a remarkable and major achievement and, of course, to thank those who have helped you along the way.

PASSHE’s role in Pennsylvania’s innovation imperative

PASSHE’s mission is simple—provide all Pennsylvanians with affordable, high-quality education, enabling them to participate productively in the 21st-century economy, sustain themselves and their families, and contribute meaningfully to their communities. In pursuit of that mission, we regularly review and revise everything we do. Why? Because while our purpose remains, the world in which we pursue it changes at an ever-accelerating pace.

Our students are changing. Today, they come from all walks of life and all ages. It is because of what public universities and community colleges have done since the 1950s that opportunities—once available to only a small fraction of our society—have been democratized. What’s more, high school graduates are no longer the majority of students enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges. As shown by Higher Learning Advocates in the figure copied below, they are joined by working learners, parents, and so many others.

The world of work for which we prepare students is also changing. Sixty percent of all jobs in Pennsylvania today require someone in them with some higher education; therefore, it is not surprising that the more you learn, the more you earn. Accordingly, attending a public university is now the most affordable and reliable pathway to sustaining careers. In part as a consequence, lifelong learning – repeat visits to universities – once the exception, is now also the norm. Programs of study leading to bachelor’s and master’s degrees continue to be a central part of what we do. We therefore need to be more responsive to students and employers who are looking for shorter programs of study that deliver specific skills as recognized by industry-based certificates or licenses. The supply of non-degree credentials has exploded in recent years, reaching nearly half a million at last count, in 2019.

Lastly, the tools we use to fashion our students’ educational experience change—at light speed given the pace of technological advance. A decade ago, online learning was on the cutting edge. Today online learning is common; the cutting edge of educational technology belongs to artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality.

To keep up with these rapid and layered changes in pursuit of our historic mission requires relentless intellectual curiosity and an entrepreneurial spirit that restlessly asks how do we, as educational institutions, better and more affordably serve our students, their employers, our communities? How do we help even more people cross the bridge to opportunity that is afforded to them by public higher education?

To answer these and other similar questions, all we have to do is look to the innovation already existing and developing within our State System universities. They show us the answer, which is, in short, that we innovate, we hustle, we work together with one another, with employers and with schools and community colleges. Here are few examples:

In partnership with Pennsylvania’s Department of Education and Department of Labor and Industry respectively, and with the Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), PASSHE is exploring the development of a prototype inventory of all the credentials that PASSHE universities and HACC produce in healthcare and IT. The prototype seeks to help students evaluate educational options in these broad areas and how they connect with careers and earning potential. It would also help employers connect with students who have the skills they are looking for. If successful, the registry may be extended to include credentials produced by other Pennsylvania colleges and universities, and/or those from PASSHE universities and HACC leading to jobs in other industry areas.

We are using technology in creative new ways outside the “classroom.” In West Chester University’s moonshot initiative, for example, we are incorporating technologies that use millions of observations about how students progress in their educational journeys to identify the obstacles that commonly trip them up, and the actions that support them best when they stumble.

We work together and with employer partners to build innovative educational pathways that help people enter and grow in sustaining careers, focusing often in areas where skilled workers are in shortest supply.

• Cheyney University, the School District of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Department of Education, and the Community College of Philadelphia are working in partnership to expand the number of diverse teachers in the Philadelphia public school system. They begin with students in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, and encourage them to go into teaching.
• HACC, Harrisburg University, Shippensburg University, and the Giant Company are working together to create pathways that connect educational opportunities across the three institutions to build pathways for those seeking to launch and advance careers in agribusiness.
• At East Stroudsburg University, students pursuing degrees in business, education, sports administration, and other fields, are earning badges along the way. The badges testify to their mastery of competencies that are in high demand by employers. Using these badges, students are getting great internships and jobs even in advance of their completing their baccalaureate degrees.

This necessarily restless quest for continuous innovation and renewal also is pursued in partnership with universities outside of Pennsylvania. Our innovation imperative is a national, not a regional, phenomenon. For example, Indiana University of Pennsylvania is part of partnership with more than a dozen institutions nationally who are considering a simple proposition which, if true, could have profound and very positive impacts on the cost of a college degree. Does a bachelor’s degree always require 120 credit hours of seat time, or can the same learning be accomplished with less, providing that bridge to opportunity in a faster and more affordable manner?

There is significant historic precedent and considerable evidence that such a hypothesis may prove true, and these are described in greater detail in a memorandum provided to the State Board of Education in support of a waiver seeking the necessary permissions to mount the pilot over a period of years with a small handful of courses, gathering evidence about potential for impact. Assuming it is possible to deliver the same learning outcomes in three year as in four, consider the potential impact on the net price we are asking students to pay to acquire a baccalaureate degree. Imagine the impact if the degree is pursued in partnership with community colleges where students might attend for their first one or even two years. Is the potential benefit not great enough to warrant empirical investigation? I wonder what students and their families would say if we asked them? I wonder what they would say if we, as educators—bound by statute to provide the most affordable higher education possible—refused even to consider the opportunity.

These and many other initiatives currently underway at Pennsylvania’s state-owned universities represent the continued innovation and renewal that necessarily defines the world of public higher education today. It requires that today’s college communities bring an entrepreneurial, growth mindset that eagerly looks through the front windshield, only glancing occasionally in the rearview mirror to ensure we keep sight of our historic purpose and core values. It is sustained by investment in our faculty and staff and our willingness to try—but not always succeed—as we constantly seek new ways of expanding access, improving success, and driving down cost of attendance for all our students.

And it entails our staying in close touch with the people and communities we serve, helping them understand why the world of education needs to evolve, why it will look different today than when they were students, why we need continuously to innovate so that more people cross the bridge to opportunity in these post-pandemic times, and why holding true and fast to our mission entails our constantly evaluating and evolving everything we do.

New beginnings

The start of the academic year always makes me giddy. My visit to Slippery Rock University a few weeks ago was another reminder – thanks, colleagues in Butler County! I had the pleasure of touring SRU’s new engineering labs with their super-cool new scientific equipment and totally remodeled, state-of-the-art visual and performing arts spaces. Students entering any of these programs, you are in for a unique and world-class experience. I am genuinely excited for you.

 And I had the good fortune to meet with faculty and staff who were just bristling with excitement about the start of the semester. Maybe that was because there were still a few weeks left of summer or because it was a beautiful day with a nice lunch.  Or maybe it was because the faculty and staff I met with know just how special SRU really is – special as all our universities are – understand our universities’ capabilities and are poised to turn them into real life-changing gains for real students.

Does the pandemic experience cast a long shadow? Yes, of course it does, here as elsewhere across higher education, and the effects of the pandemic are likely to be felt for years as students who have experienced education loss at any point from kindergarten all the way through the education pipeline. So does the integration of six universities into Commonwealth University and PennWest University and the very difficult decisions that universities had to make across the System in order to regain the confidence of Pennsylvania’s General Assembly, and through it the people of Pennsylvania. These, too, cast a long shadow, and they are likely to for some time to come. 

We have traveled light years together in no time at all. Not always comfortably. But in doing so, we have arrived at a unique, historic opportunity to re-establish the role and value that public higher education plays in this state as an engine of economic development and social mobility. Our audience – the people of this commonwealth – is listening with open ears. Have you been following the news media surrounding the State System and its universities? Have you listened to legislative hearings and read the media reports about them? The narrative is shifting. It’s no longer almost exclusively focused on management, financial, and enrollment challenges, or on the workloads and pay of our employees. 

The resurgence of a positive narrative speaks to the power and promise of the public higher education we uniquely provide in this state. It is grounded in the enormous need that Pennsylvania feels for affordable pathways into sustaining careers, without which our commonwealth cannot address its talent gap. The positive narrative is grounded in appreciative inquiry about what we really can do to improve outcomes for the students we do enroll, while at the same time opening the aperture to opportunities we can provide to others who have hitherto been underserved. With the enactment of the FY 2022-23 state budget, the legislature and the governor have invested in that promise at a level that restores our support to where it was near the high-water mark years of our growth. I am so grateful for their trust and confidence – it is so well deserved! I’m certain will be repaid with dividends in the form of more students served. 

I look forward to visiting campuses. As ever, I want to hear from you about the issues on your mind. I also want to know from you what we need to do to deliver on this next phase of our redesign – the one that grows the number of Pennsylvanians whom we enroll and graduate. 

Shortly after the  legislature and the governor solidified their historic investment in us in July, I presented to my manager, the Board, the System’s goals . They double as my goals and factor into my performance management.   

The goals are clustered in five areas:

1.       Expanding student opportunities and improving student outcomes.

2.       Expanding student affordability and growing.

3.       Operating sustainably.

4.       Enhancing our partnership with the state.

5.       Investing in our people and our infrastructure so we can achieve all of the above.

I look forward to getting input from you on the opportunities you see in any or all of these areas, especially 1, 2, and 5. I’m hoping to do that by engaging with you in the work. I want to see how you are advancing these and other objectives in an educational setting, with student supports, and via other means. I also want to engage with you on what you perceive is the cutting edge of your work and our service to our students and this commonwealth.

By the time we meet, it will have been a while for some of us since we’ve seen each other outside the Hollywood squares that frame our Zoom interactions. Spoiler alert: I’m greyer, probably a little shorter, and maybe moving more stiffly than I once was. But I am still an unabashed optimist. As I wrote in my very first blog on this very point: “I can’t help myself. I see great opportunities for our universities, for our System, and – especially – for our students. I do not believe we face any obstacle that cannot be overcome with our collective talents and creativity.” Nothing has changed in that regard. Not an iota. Not in four very eventful years. 

And as ever, this blog serves as one of the many ways for us to exchange ideas. I hope you’ll use it to provide feedback, whether in the comments feature below or by mailing me directly at Chancellor@passhe.edu.

The Opportunities Ahead

Saturday, July 9, 2022, was a day I won’t soon forget – filled with gratitude, steeped in humility. Melissa and I were at the Kutztown Festival, a celebration of Pennsylvania Dutch culture that dates back decades. The sky was clear, the temperature forgiving, the mood particularly high because this year, unlike the past two, the festival was unimpeded by pandemic accommodation. If you haven’t been to the festival, you should go.

My mood was additionally brightened, because the day before the General Assembly had passed and the governor had signed the state budget, approving a historically unprecedented 16% increase in the System’s appropriation (from $477.5 million to $552 million) and $125 million in one-time funding.

I am tremendously grateful to Governor Wolf and the General Assembly for their belief in the power and promise of public higher education that is our System. Recovering the confidence and investment of our owners – the state – has been a long road – at least a decade long, but I’m sure those with greater lived experience of our System’s recent history would be justified in pushing its start back even further. And it has been a hard road to travel. Gratitude again. This time to our faculty, staff, trustees, and alumni who are on this journey together. For your effort, commitment, compassion, collective creativity, resilience, and intelligence.

Our future lies ahead, and I urge all of us to look forward, together. There will be challenges. But the opportunities are even greater, and I am confident that we can choose to take full advantage of and go after them. As a collective (but only as a collective) we are that good, that talented, that capable.

This week, I reviewed those opportunities for the Board. They are the rationale of our System’s redesign; they comprise the promise we made to the state in return for its re-investment. In those opportunities lie our future success. They have been regularly featured in this blog, so I will treat them briefly here.

Our opportunities are grounded in the state’s needs – particularly its needs for an adequately educated workforce. We are the state’s owned universities. It makes sense for us to align our priorities with its needs. And they are urgent.

Sixty percent of today’s jobs require someone in them with some higher education that has been attained by only 51 percent of Pennsylvanian adults. The need is particularly great among adults with B.A.s and M.A.s, but there is also significant demand for so-called non-degree “industry recognized” credentials (typically resulting from short and very focused courses of study).

We cannot fill that gap by relying solely on our traditional source of students – those attending college soon after graduating high school (although we can increase the share of them that attend a State System university). There simply aren’t enough of them, and their number is projected to decline significantly from 2026.

There are opportunities nonetheless – big ones.

• Improving graduation rates of the students we do enroll.
• Enrolling traditional aged students who are “college ready” but not college bound, or in regions or communities that are generally underserved.
• Enrolling adults who are looking to complete a degree they began but interrupted years ago.

Taking advantage of these opportunities requires that we continue to work with our owners – the state – and with new partners, like employers who turn to internships and tuition assistance programs in order to build the talented workforce they need and struggle to maintain, to lower our net average price. The greatest opportunities we have are with people who can least afford attending a State System university – and we are the most affordable option in the state.

Taking advantage of these opportunities entails continuous evolution of our academic programs – doubling down on degrees and non-degree credentials in areas that lead to careers in occupations that are particularly starved for talent, such as healthcare, IT, financial services, and education, to name only a few; expanding hybrid and fully online options for people who are unable or choose not to participate in a face-to-face experience; developing more pathways that connect directly with the workforce and assist students along through in-service learning options.

Taking advantage of these opportunities requires that we strengthen the capabilities that have made us so successful, for so long, with so many traditional students. Turns out, education is not a water hose – turn it on the next person, they get just as wet as the last. You know this. Education is highly personalized. Effectively engaging a working adult with a family and a job is wholly different than engaging a student-athlete who attends one of our universities directly after graduating high school. And there are as many other fine distinctions of student need and mindset.

Taking advantage of these opportunities, in other words, means that we invest in ourselves, in our faculty and staff – in further developing already strong skills and abilities, so that we may be equipped to go forward. The investment we sought from the state, was made with these goals directly in view. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to equip ourselves so that we may not only survive but thrive into the 21st century.

The priorities that I presented to the Board at its meeting this week – each associated with a set of measurable goals – provide a framework within which I have cast my own goals as chancellor (goals that are posted annually to the web), and within which I expect our university leadership to operate, focusing their attention and effort. Working within their own shared governance structures, presidents will determine how and where to direct their efforts and associated resources, all of which are distributed to them for their use. I would expect them, as in all things, to direct their efforts differently in ways that reflect local circumstances, opportunities, and strategic priorities. (System Redesign has as a design principle, giving universities a higher degree of responsibility for determining their strategic direction in return for a higher level of accountability to the Board.) And I look forward in reporting back in these pages, and elsewhere, on our collective progress.

Gratitude to be sure. And yes, at long last a sense of excitement at the prospect of re-invigoration, reinvestment, and growth.

And that feeling of gratitude brings me to humility and back to our visit to the Kutztown Festival, and the people we met on July 9, the passions they showed for our System, its mission, our students; the quality of their work; the brilliance of their insights. One was a trustee of Kutztown University. He grew up in the community, understands its history through generations of lived experience, is the perfect advocate for Kutztown and our System – admiring of its role and its work, ready and willing to give up precious spare time and deliberate attention to ensure continuous improvement.

Two others work at Kutztown. One is an anthropologist who began his work on a Polynesian island (as anthropologists do). His interest in the Pennsylvania Dutch grew naturally from his location at KU. His facility traveling across the cultures he knew and had researched in order to illustrate insights about how culture in general evolves and changes, was nothing short of inspiring. One spent a lifetime researching and writing about the Pennsylvania Dutch from a KU center, ensconced recently in new digs and hosting a collection of over 20,000 items. Both live and breathe the Pennsylvania Dutch – its folklore and folklife (yes, there is a distinction between more literary and more material aspects of a culture). They are also amazing teachers. Experts in the craft of meaningfully guiding the rankest of novices through information and toward insights – even wisdom – that drive a deeper understanding of the unmodern world. I know because I was enthralled by the richly discursive tour we enjoyed that morning. I know because I couldn’t extract myself from the “seminar” tent that afternoon where any number of topics were presented and discussed. The festival is undoubtedly a centerpiece for both colleagues and has been for years. I’m guessing they are spending long hours throughout the 10-day duration and multiples of that again in prep. We were there on the ninth day. If they were tired and worn out, it was not obvious. Quite the contrary. Their energy and enthusiasm were positively infectious.

So, here’s the thing … Melissa and I have both brushed up against the analytical underpinnings upon which our colleagues had built their professional careers. Melissa is an art historian, curator, and critic for whom artistic expression is a window onto cultural flows and how they stack up at once to shape and reflect specific moments in time. I am and always will be a one-time historian who got swept up in the early 1980s by the use of artifact as evidence. Elizabeth Johns and Henry Glassie were two of my academic heroes back in the day. You can imagine the conversation with colleagues once we discovered how and where our worlds collided. It didn’t take long to find the touch points in our respective academic lineages or to connect on issues where we found a common source of interest – the transmission of minority languages and prospects for revitalizing them, for example.

As chancellor, I get to interact so often with so many of our faculty, staff, and students. But I rarely have an opportunity to engage so directly with people around the academic and educational aspects at the center of our work. On July 9, I did. And I was deeply humbled by the experience.  I have always been tremendously proud to be affiliated with this great organization, but never more so than on that day.

The Kutztown Festival – at least put it on your to-do list. It is an effective entrée into a distinctive American heritage that combines engagement with material and performance cultures, arts, crafts, and yes, academic research, with a modest and wholly entertaining dose of commercialism.

Why a system? The Power and Promise of Public Higher Education

Students choose a university because it’s a good fit for them. Students know this. Parents know this. (I know this, having lived the experience with our two kids.) The choice is often driven by a combination of factors such as the school’s reputation, academic programs, cost, size, location, overall “feel” of the campus and more. 

But I wonder if there is an added value for students who choose to attend a PASSHE university? If the State System did a joint marketing campaign with any of our universities, how would the benefit of being part of the system be represented? What distinctive qualities does it provide for a PASSHE university student, their parents, the surrounding community? Great questions. So good, in fact, that I thought I’d suggest some answers here, where I could also invite comment from you.   

Advantages appear to me in two categories: 1) those having to do with the fact that PASSHE universities are public, and 2) those having to do with their being part of a system.  

CATEGORY 1: THERE ARE AT LEAST FOUR REASONS STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM ATTENDING A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY:    

Public universities are the most affordable four-year higher education options in the state. While the state contributes a mere 25% of our total revenues, students fund the remaining 75%. That 25% is vitally important and allows us to maintain a net average price of attendance that is lower than at other Pennsylvania universities and colleges. While the price gap has narrowed over the years, it still exists and is important to the students we serve—70% of whom are from low- and middle-income Pennsylvania families.

Yes, of course, other Pennsylvania universities and colleges receive federal and state funding. This includes Pell and PHEAA state grants made directly to students, as well as federal and state agency investments that are made directly to universities and colleges. Perversely (though this should come as no surprise in a society that has proven to be so good at reproducing privilege across generations), elite, private research universities enjoy the highest level of public support when measured in dollars per student FTE. At the University of Pennsylvania—a research powerhouse that also manages an important medical establishment—19% of students receive federal grant aid, including Pell and Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) dollars of $8,449, as compared to the $4,132 average that 51% of State System students receive. 

It is also true that many schools—state-related as well as private—offer some of their students enough institutional aid to rival a PASSHE university price. Penn even boasts that students from families earning less than $90,000 a year will attend tuition-free. It can do this because it has a sizeable endowment ($20.5 billion in 2021) and a “high fees, high aid” tuition model. That means it enrolls as many students as it can who pay full price so it can subsidize those from lower-income backgrounds who cannot. The challenge is that no school, no matter how richly endowed, has enough financial aid to consistently beat the net average price paid by students at a State System university. That brings me directly to the second distinctive advantage of a public university.   

Public universities are readily available to all Pennsylvanians. We are inclusive. There are at least two ways to think about our inclusiveness: 

• We accept most students, providing a path that is unavailable at many other colleges and universities. Our two most selective universities respectively admit 80% and 81% of all applicants. The rest of our universities accept 90% or more of those who apply. This means we are available not only to students who enroll directly in our honors colleges and are as good academically as students anywhere in the country, but we also accept those looking for (and deserving) a second chance to advance themselves educationally—students who may not be considered elsewhere. Yes, at Penn you can have a free ride on tuition if you earn less than $90,000, but only if you are fortunate enough to be among the 7% of all applicants that are admitted.
• State System universities are the most affordable four-year option in Pennsylvania, which creates opportunities for students who are priced out of other universities. No surprise, then, to discover that:
• 70% of our traditional-age students (those enrolling within a few years after high school graduation) are from families earning at or below the average/median household income in Pennsylvania; 
• 32% are first in their family to go to college; 
• 33% qualify for Pell grants, meaning they are from lower-income families.  
• Also, unsurprisingly, our students are as diverse as the demographics of Pennsylvania, because we are the people’s universities.

Public universities are absolutely critical to the economic health and well-being of Pennsylvania. This is an audacious claim. It’s also true. As I’ve written elsewhere, 60% of all jobs in the state today require a person with some higher education—anything from a credential in phlebotomy to a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Yet today, only 51% of all Pennsylvania adults have some higher education. That creates a so-called “talent gap.” And the gap is growing. Workforce estimates suggest that by 2030, Pennsylvania will require 15.7% more people educated to the master’s level, 8.1% more to the bachelor’s level, 5.5% more to the associate level, and 4% more with non-degree credentials.   

To fill its share of the gap, PASSHE universities would need to produce 2,000 more bachelor’s degrees, 1,200 more master’s degrees, and perhaps as many as 2,500 additional non-degree credentials every year, starting today, and sustaining that level of production at least through 2030. Every other Pennsylvania university and college would also need to expand its credentialing productivity proportionally to achieve that goal. Here’s the thing. They can’t. Why? Because there aren’t enough people who can afford the average price of attending other universities and colleges, and other universities and colleges don’t have enough financial aid to lower their net average price to enroll enough students. Realistically, given the economics of private and state-related higher education, PASSHE universities are the only economical path to reduce the talent gap by educating and graduating enough people to meet the needs of the workforce in Pennsylvania.    

The marginal cost of each additional credential is lower at a State System university than anywhere else. And let me be clear: I’m describing a math problem, not making a statement about the relative value of private, state-related and public universities and colleges. This brings me to a third distinctive value claimed by PASSHE universities. (Did I already say they are Pennsylvania’s only public universities?)  

Public universities are engines of social mobility. A while back I published what were then very new data on State System graduates’ salaries one, three, five, and 10 years after graduation. The data demonstrate the true power of public higher education.   

• The vast majority of our graduates get “good jobs,” earning considerably more (nearly a million dollars more on average over a lifetime) than people who end their formal education after receiving a high school diploma.
• Ten years after they graduate, students who enrolled in one of our universities with a low income will be earning about as much as students who enrolled with a high income.  
• The same leveling-up effect is apparent when you layer race onto income. Thus, a low-income Black student will, 10 years after graduation, be earning about as much as a high-income white student.

Yes, other universities and colleges also propel their graduates into good jobs and drive social mobility. But few if any of the four-year options in Pennsylvania can claim the depth and breadth of impact that State System universities have. Benefitting from state support, we open our doors to and serve a higher proportion of low- and middle-income students than are typically found elsewhere. PASSHE universities sustainably serve far more low- and middle-income students than private and state-related universities that rely on a high-fees, high-aid approach along with massive endowments. That’s the whole point of public higher education. Our universities are funded to change lives—a lot of them—to lift up people and their families en masse. 

CATEGORY 2: OUR STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM ATTENDING A UNIVERSITY THAT IS PART OF A SYSTEM OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.   

Universities are more efficient when they are part of a system. These efficiencies reduce university costs and help to keep student tuition and fees down and/or achieve greater impact (typically measured in service quality) for the dollars they spend. Some examples:

• By buying as part of a procurement collective, universities gain leverage in the marketplace and secure lower prices than they would if they operated on their own. 
• By sharing appointments (employees), universities can fill vital roles with talented people who may not be as affordable or available or make as much sense financially to an institution operating independently. Among other examples, our universities share human resources functions to improve efficiencies and several universities share courses and faculty in order to provide students with more offerings. This level of cross-university coordination is groundbreaking for the system and is only the beginning of what we can accomplish for students to control costs and expand their opportunities.

Students gain expanded educational opportunities as State System universities share educational programming. Shared programming is a centerpiece of our System Redesign, which at its core envisions a world in which students enrolled at one PASSHE university can more easily access educational opportunities at another PASSHE university. We know that technology is a foundational component to running a university—upgrading to a modern, cloud-based, mobile-enabled platform will enable all students to benefit from a common set of functionalities. It is so important a centerpiece of our work that we have invested $14 million in realizing the vision by implementing a common student information system (SIS). Installed in phases over a four-year period, the “OneSIS” will enable students seamlessly to find, register in, take, and get degree credit for courses available at PASSHE universities other than the one in which they are enrolled. Think of the opportunities.

Working together, universities can offer students more educational opportunities than any one university could on its own. By sharing courses (as opposed to full academic programs), universities provide their students access to:

• More majors, minors, areas of concentration, and experts or specialists than they can afford on their own; and 
• greater course availability to help keep students on track to completion.  

Systems are “scaling agents” that can accelerate innovative ideas and practices that expand student access, improve affordability or improve student outcomes. What the heck does that mean? Innovations are relatively easy to dream up, pilot and prototype. Taking them to scale is a different matter. The vast majority stagnate at the pilot or prototype stage, never reaching a majority of potential beneficiaries even where they demonstrate positive impact and financial viability.  Systems are uniquely able to drive innovations to scale more quickly in order to benefit the students they serve.  

Other ways students benefit from universities working together in a system include:

• PASSHE universities offer reasonable class sizes. All of our universities deservedly boast of a caring and committed faculty and student-facing staff that put students first. And faculty engage with students in classes that are intimate in scale: 53% of all classes have fewer than 25 students and only 4% have more than 60. This kind of intimacy is common at private liberal arts colleges, but at few other institutions.
• Our universities maintain a wide range of athletics programs, student clubs and associations that emphasize student engagement. That’s a good thing because research shows that students who are engaged in the life of a university do significantly better in terms of graduation than those who are not. 
• Undergraduate degrees are grounded in a general education that provide students with the important skills—critical thinking, communication, etc.—that employers universally value, while including specific technical or professional skills that equip students for their career path. While the combination is not wholly unique, it is rare. And it significantly advantages State System students in pursuit of sustaining careers.

CONCLUSION

When I consider the question of how to articulate the value of choosing a university that is part of a public system, I am encouraged by all of this and more. Because we are public, PASSHE universities remain the most affordable four-year higher education option—allowing students from every walk of life to gain a pathway to opportunities that would be closed at other schools. And because we are a system, each university can do more together than they ever could by themselves. That is a real value to our students. 

Now, I want to hear from you. I invite you to comment in the space below or send me your thoughts via email (chancellor@passhe.edu).

______________________________

[1] by Kriss Deiglmeier & Amanda Greco, “ Why Proven Solutions Struggle to Scale Up”, Stanford Social Innovation Review (August 10, 2018)