Armed with facts

As we move through the rest of this academic year, I will share information from time to time meant to equip you to advocate for our State System universities. We are requesting from the Commonwealth a historic investment in our universities and our students—more than $750 million in total—and will spend the next six months making our case for greater investment. 

This month’s blog post focuses on how PASSHE—as the affordable, high-quality option—is critically important to the prosperity of the students we serve and the Commonwealth at large. I hope you find the following informative and, more important, useful as you do your part to advocate for investment in PASSHE.

State System universities lift up people and communities

Our universities are effective engines of workforce and economic development. Our graduates —including those who begin higher education at a community college—go on to meaningful and well-paid careers in high-demand areas, including business, health, STEM, and education. They are Pennsylvania’s thinkers, workers, and leaders of today and tomorrow. Nearly two-thirds work and live in Pennsylvania ten years after graduation.

Our universities are effective engines of social mobility. We serve all Pennsylvania and all Pennsylvanians. As the state’s most affordable four-year education option, we are particularly important for low- and middle-income students and for students from communities that higher education has historically underserved (including rural, underrepresented minority, and adult students). And as demonstrated in data presented in last month’s blog about our graduates’ earnings ten years out, our claim is more than just a promise. It is a reality.

Our universities are drivers of regional economic development. They:

• support nearly 50,000 jobs across the state;
• are often top-ten employers in their regions; and
• return more than $8 in economic impact for every $1 of state funds invested in them.

Affordability is key

Mobility indices—that is, the data that show the extent to which a university supports the upward mobility of its graduates in terms of income—are echoes from the past. They are built upon what students paid to complete their degrees a decade ago (or more) and on the earnings they receive today. What was happening in Pennsylvania higher education a decade ago? For a start, the average net price a student paid to attend a State System university (that includes tuition, fees, room, and board, minus all grants and aid) was $6,500 per year less than the next lowest-cost option (Penn State). That’s $26,000 less per BA degree – assuming a student completed their degree in four years. That’s a lot, and it goes a long way in explaining the robust enrollments our State System universities enjoyed a decade ago.

Flash forward to 2021, State System university enrollments are down 27 percent from 2010. Of course, some of that (maybe 5 to 7 percent) can be explained by shrinkage in the size of the high-school leaving population—the primary source from which our universities recruit their students. Another 8 percent may be explained away by the pandemic’s impacts on enrollments at less selective public four-year universities. A good part of the remaining 12 to 14 percent has to be laid at the feet of price. Since 2010, the average net price of attending a State System university has increased by well over 60 percent. The average graduating students’ debt has increased by nearly 40 percent to $36,000 (in 2019). By comparison, the average debt held by a student graduating from the State University of New York (SUNY) is less than $27,000 (about the level ours was at over a decade ago). At the City University of New York (CUNY), it is about $2,000. No wonder New York’s public colleges and universities consistently appear in the top ten of higher education institutions nationally when ranked according to a social mobility index.

What’s more, the affordability advantage that the State System universities held for so long over other Pennsylvania-based options has collapsed. Competing ever more aggressively to attract a declining number of traditional students (those entering college directly out of high school), Pennsylvania’s public and private colleges and universities use various forms of scholarship funding to offer incoming students attractive pricing. You would have thought that aggressive price competition would be good for students and depress price. Alas, not so. In the higher education marketplace, it works against low- and middle-income students in particular. Colleges and universities set price at the maximum rate they believe the average student can afford (even if only just barely). Federal grants (Pell) and state grants (PHEAA) can provide some relief, but they haven’t kept pace with the hyper-inflation being experienced in the net price of attendance, and as such, contribute an ever-shrinking share of the total a student pays to attend university. For low- and middle-income families, it is not uncommon for them to spend as much as 45 percent of their annual household income to send one child to a State System university for a single year. And State System universities are still the most affordable four-year option in Pennsylvania.

So, what happens when low- and middle-income students are priced out of the higher education marketplace and all the benefits higher education degrees bestow on those who obtain them? Nothing good for people or the state.

Let’s start with people. Faced with high and growing prices, prospective students turn away from higher education altogether or seek lower-cost, out-of-state options. This accounts in large part for steep enrollment declines this past decade at State System universities and community colleges—the very institutions that were established to ensure that lower-cost, high quality higher education options were available to all Pennsylvanians, not just those fortunate enough to have been born into affluent families or to land a healthy college scholarship.

For those who do soldier on and sustain the increasing price of attending an in-state university, they experience ever more financial hardship. Data collected at some of our universities are heartbreaking. Today, somewhere between a third and a half of all our students experience some form of financial insecurity during the course of an academic year. That means they don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis, have insecure housing, and/or are reliant for basic needs on some form of public assistance, college food pantries, and other emergency aid programs. Their stories are heartbreaking, and we will be gathering and publishing them over the course of the coming months. Yes, one can and really must admire the grit and determination that our students and their families show in confronting the hardships that are imposed upon them by run-away inflation in higher education. But at the same time, we have to ask why these hardships should be experienced at all. For what possible benefit?

Looking at the impacts on the Commonwealth, those questions are even harder to answer. Pennsylvania is experiencing a chronic “talent gap”—its employers are starved of the educated workforce they need to remain competitive. The gap is real, it is growing, and it is widespread across economic sectors. And it can only be filled by improving the education attainment level of the under-represented students defined above; something that itself can only be accomplished by re-establishing affordable higher education pathways.

This isn’t really a policy issue. It is a math problem. It has to do with the number of jobs that need filling by people with some higher education and the number of affluent people able easily to afford access to and completion of a college credential. Further, failure to address the gap has severe and long-range consequences for Pennsylvania’s economic competitiveness and well-being, which appear already to be slipping relative to other states. Today, for example, Pennsylvania ranks 41st nationally in terms of unemployment (ten years ago, it was 24th).

Finally, addressing the talent gap by re-establishing affordable higher education pathways is not a regional issue. Both rural and urban students are priced out of higher education and denied access to the opportunities it affords. Nor is It a partisan political issue. The students who suffer most hail from all points along the political spectrum.

Universities and colleges have a role to play, and by and large, they know it. I can tell you that the State System universities know it, and I have written about this before. Our job is to align programs with both student and employer needs, to operate with optimum effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and accountability. In this way, we are good and conscientious stewards of the hard-earned dollars we receive as revenues from students and taxpayers. In this way, we shore up the public’s trust.

Our State System universities are playing their part. What remains is a broader discussion about the kind of commonwealth we want to become and who within it should have the opportunity to sustain themselves and their families, contribute to their communities, and participate effectively in the 21st-century economy.

That’s what, why, and for whom we are fighting, and you can help by partnering with us to advocate #Together4PASSHE.