Public higher education: more than an experiment

 As we prepare to close out another year, I hope we will all take a moment to reflect on and acknowledge our tremendous accomplishments. Their most vivid instantiation is in the graduates who are walking across our stages (whether physically or virtually) this month. Drawn from all walks of life, they prepare to advance into our world with blessings bestowed on them by their first-hand encounter with the power and very real promise that is public higher education—that is our State System universities.      

Every graduate’s experience of higher education is unique. This cohort is no exception. Their experience was flavored by navigating extraordinary times marked by pandemic, unprecedented levels of political and societal upheaval, and then some. Despite this, they are as well prepared as any of our graduating cohorts to make their way—drawing upon the soft skills and hard skills they developed—and are able to sustain themselves and their families, contribute to their communities, and pay it forward to the next generation. And they are well prepared because of all that our faculty and staff do on a daily basis to ensure our students are cared for, challenged intellectually and critically, supported in developing deep and lasting friendships, and prepared to engage thoughtfully and constructively in a complex world filled with people of diverse backgrounds and world views. This is the promise of power and public higher education. To our faculty and staff, I say thank you for everything you do for our students, their communities, our universities and this Commonwealth.             

And it is in this vein, in light of this enormous potential, that I’ve been thinking a lot about the decline of public higher education—state divestment, marked decline in the public’s trust, doubt cast with an increasingly wide net on students’ return on their investment—all aspects. I am not proposing here to debate the reasons. They are multifaceted, and—yes—we inside the academy own our fair share of responsibility for these disturbing trends. I’ve been thinking far more about impacts than causes, at least lately. Who suffers from that decline? Where are the impacts felt? And why should we care?      

Beginning with the end in mind, we should care because postsecondary education is still the most reliable pathway into a sustaining career and a healthy and productive life. Education attainment levels don’t just track with salaries. They track with better health outcomes, civic engagement, family stability, less exposure to unemployment, and a whole host of other indicators that support the proposition. Yes, of course degree attained, program of study pursued, and institution attended materially affect outcomes, and the recently published report of the so-called values commission presented data showing a disturbingly large minority of college graduates not earning the “wage premium” that applies on average to degree holders (shame on us all—higher ed leaders, policy makers, and accreditors—if we are not taking corrective action especially where those results are returned at the taxpayers’ expense). Overall, the proposition holds in general, and it certainly holds for graduates of our State System universities as demonstrated in last month’s blog.      

We should care, because public universities and colleges are among the last venues where people have an opportunity to engage directly with and develop understanding of and empathy with those unlike themselves—people from distinctive backgrounds, with different experiences and aspirations, political inclinations, and world views. Our universities—those in this State System at any rate—have so far been able to buck trends in which people surround themselves exclusively with others who share their backgrounds, political ideologies, and world views. 

Those trends show up geographically in where people choose to live; they show up politically in the rapid growth of “safe seats” (political districts where one party is consistently returned to office with 7 percent or more margin of victory); they show up in audience engagement with social and other media in which people tend to follow only those information sources that align with their own world views; they show up (sadly) in political and civic discourse through which small, like-minded, and tightly knit groups define themselves by disparaging others—something I’ve seen framed as the tribalism of shared hatred. I am not wholly optimistic that we will find a way to overcome the differences that have emerged to define us, and to do so in a way that protects and preserves our fragile democracy. But I am convinced that any chance of our success relies on the continued strength of our public universities and colleges where people engage with one another and learn to appreciate diversity and the role democracies play in protecting, defending, and leveraging our differences in advancing the public good.

So who suffers from the decline of public higher education?    

• Low- and middle-income families suffer. Badly. In looking at students enrolling in a PA State System university more or less directly out of high school, 53 percent come from families with household incomes of less than $75,000 annually. (The median household income in the state is about $61,000.) Those students have been suffering quietly for years. As state funding lagged, responsibility for paying university operating costs shifted to students whose net price of attending a State System university increased by 53 percent since 2010-11. The greatest impact fell onto students from families earning at or below the median household income. 
• Students from rural communities suffer. Badly. It is too easy to assume—and I have often heard it said—that people will travel to seek opportunities not available to them near their homes. This used to be the case. It isn’t any longer. Residents of rural communities are less likely than residents of non-rural communities to move in search of better economic opportunities—a “better” life—and are, as a consequence, conscious of being “left behind” (Mckinsey, 2021). Hmm. Let’s consider this for a moment in our context. The majority of our State System universities are located in more rural communities. The majority of their students come from the surrounding four or five (also mostly rural) counties. They are typically among the State System universities experiencing the greatest enrollment decline and the most severe financial challenges. Their challenges reflect regional demographic trends, to be sure, but even the more accelerated population decline experienced by Pennsylvania’s rural counties cannot account for more than a third of the steep enrollment declines we are seeing. Increasing net average price of attendance is much more to blame given its impact on families hailing from communities where the average household income is well south of the statewide average. As the most affordable four-year postsecondary option in the state drifts out of reach for people in these communities, they are left behind. Sadly, given data on the benefits that accrue to college graduates and the declining levels of geographic mobility, this sense of being left behind is more than just a perception. It is a reality.
• Republicans and Democrats suffer badly, about in equal measure. In Pennsylvania, college access and attainment are non-partisan (or maybe bi-partisan) issues, at least according to the data. Layering the 2020 presidential electoral map by county onto county-level enrollment and university employee data shows that about half of State System universities’ Fall 2020 enrollments came from PA counties voting for Biden where about a third of all State System employees lived. One needs to be careful so as to not commit the dreaded “ecological fallacy.” Not all students enrolling or employees living in a particular county will claim the party affiliation of the county majority. Accordingly, the data are indicative but not definitive. Still, it stands to reason than in a swing state like Pennsylvania, the decline of public higher education ramifies more or less equally for both major political parties.
• Students who have historically been underserved by higher education suffer. Badly. State System universities are not equally diverse as one would expect at institutions that draw primarily from and thus reflect the demographic composition of their surrounding counties. The System overall, though, evolves continually to reflect the demographic composition of the state. But there is another dimension of public higher education’s diversity that is underplayed and potentially undervalued. Demand for and experience of postsecondary education in 2021 is a lot different than, say, in 1990. Today, the number of students—and thus demand from those seeking to participate—in a full-time residential undergraduate education directly after high school is declining. At the same time, demand is growing amongst people who are:
• working and/or have families and are accordingly not open to or available for a fully residential experience;
• seeking short course, non-degree credentials that help them get a leg up in the labor market, and may eventually accumulate into something looking like a baccalaureate degree;
• in possession of a baccalaureate degree and seeking to improve their standing in the labor market by pursuing a post-graduate degree or certificate. 

• Employers suffer. Badly. It is useful to remember that State System universities were created to meet pressing workforce demand, notably for teachers. If they replicated the quadrivium in part it was because components of it were deemed to be essential professional knowledge. While our universities have changed considerably since their founding, their role as an engine of workforce development has not. Today, degrees in STEM, health, business, and, of course, education make up more than half of all those minted by State System universities and considerably more than half of all new programs of study that are created. The trend reflects changes in workforce need and the Sate System universities’ continued responsiveness to them. This is everything one would and should expect from institutions with our birthright—especially those that are owned by the state and are provided as a public good. There’s more, of course. Our universities ground undergraduate degrees in a general course of study from which students gain the “soft skills” that employers routinely tell us they require most from graduates—critical thinking, communication, problem solving, and the like. As an aside, this is precisely why I have never been fond of or participated in debates that rest on false dichotomization of career-oriented and liberal arts education.
• Communities suffer. Badly. Economic impact studies conducted in 2015 and 2021, respectively, show the enormous contributions State System universities make to the communities in which they are located. That economic impact has declined considerably in the intervening years (from $11 for every one state dollar invested to $8.50 for every state dollar invested). Why? The largest single factor had to do with enrollment decline, which is as much as 40 to 50 percent in our more rural schools. Impacts are exacerbated by the fact that our rural communities rely on their local university to produce their next generation of business and political leaders, health care professionals, teachers, and more. Turns out it can be challenging to recruit some people to live and work in more rural communities (though it will be interesting to see whether the trend reverses itself to some extent in the aftermath of the pandemic). As the net average price of attending a State System university (remember, that’s the most affordable four-year option in the state) exceeds what rural students can reasonably afford, communities as well as potential students are left behind.

Readers will at this stage have identified the fundamental flaw in the argument so far. None of the above suffer—badly or otherwise—if there are alternative postsecondary options that substitute for decline in the public sector. And that of course is the problem. There are alternatives, but they cost more, and the cost falls disproportionately on the people and families who are least able to afford them.     

More and more, they are left behind: Democrat and Republican Pennsylvanians from low- and middle- income families, residents of our more rural communities; black and brown people who have been underserved by higher education historically; adults and others who are seeking to advance their education level but not available for a fully residential education or even, necessarily, for a full BA or MA degree. Further, as I have argued recently in this forum, the decline of public higher education places upward pressure on the net price of attendance charged elsewhere to low-and middle-income students and the historically underserved. The tendency diminishes opportunity faster, further, leaving more and more people unable even to have, let alone pursue their version of the American dream.    

During graduate school, I attended a talk by the eminent British sociologist and student of education and social mobility, A.H. “Chelly” Halsey. He framed his talk as a question: Could democratic societies function peacefully and with high-performing economies if half or even more of their citizens were structurally denied opportunity; confined as it were to the lower rungs on a socio-economic ladder that was dramatically shortened in length? His answer was “yes, it could.” As you would expect, attending students were appalled, and we pushed back vigorously, drawing on a diverse array of academic authorities, data points, and theoretical constructs as befitting our intrinsically inter-disciplinary group. No doubt some emotion was involved as well. Chelly was undeterred and un-swayed.     

I think of him often of late—of that evening. I remember it as if it happened yesterday, not forty years ago. I’d hate to think he was right. One thing I know for certain: The decline of Pennsylvania’s public higher education—whether it is a matter of deliberate intent, neglect, or simple inaction driven by the complexity entailed in crafting politically acceptable solutions—sadly is creating a living laboratory, a natural experiment that will test Halsey’s disturbing proposition. 

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.

Keeping DEI in focus

At the risk of over-blogging, I simply have to give a shout out to the organizers, presenters, and nearly 1,000 registered participants in last week’s virtual DEI summit. What a tremendous, thoughtfully produced, collaborative, insightful, and thoroughly engaging event. 

The passion, creativity, and energy that our faculty and staff bring to the work of making our universities inclusive communities that welcome and support success of all their members was on full display. So was the desire (even urgency) presenters and participants alike felt about sharing their work, building broader coalitions around it, engaging organically in a kind of movement building the power to demonstrably improve our students’ success and our campus climates.

The scope of impactful innovation on display was breathtaking. I learned about:

• the power of storytelling in making learning communities feel safe for all their members while enabling bridge building between them.
• ground water mitigation efforts and what they look like (I‘ll never drive by a gas-station again without looking for piping sticking up through the ground) but more importantly why it matters in our thinking about the societal importance and reach of the geo-sciences.
• professional development (certificate bearing, no less) being made available to ESU faculty to improve cultural competencies and through that, student outcomes.

I had a refresher course on micro-aggressions – how to recognize them and what to do when you’ve committed or observed one, and on the power of collectives in advancing positive change.

And I gained perspective from exceptional keynote speakers bringing us the benefit of their experiences dealing with comparable issues outside the PASSHE fence (as it were). 

I left impressed by the welcoming environment that the summit seemed more or less naturally to produce, the can-do / must-do attitude on display from participants, and the sense of comradery and optimism that prevailed throughout. The latter was particularly uplifting and inspired me with hope, especially now, given, the tenor of our national discourse – its propensity for shouting with outrage and division rather than actively listening to build common ground. 

My heartfelt thanks to Vice Chancellor Pearson, her small and mighty team, our conference organizers – and to the nearly 1,000 members of our PASSHE family who took the time to share, listen, learn, and advance the ball making our communities even better places to learn, live, work, and grow.

Together for students. Together for PASSHE.

A few weeks ago, Clarion University named its basketball court after local legend, donor and now University of Kentucky basketball coach, John Calipari. I attended the dinner in his honor. While there, I learned a few things and was reminded of a few others. On the learning side, did you know that basketball players of Coach Cal’s caliber don’t just remember every game? They remember every shot attempted in every game, every disputed call, every coaching decision both on and off the court. At one of the most convivial dinners I ever attended, I had a court-side seat at the wide-ranging review Coach Cal conducted with his former high school and Clarion coaches and more than a dozen of his former Clarion team members and faculty.

What was reinforced was even more profound – the lasting positive impact that Clarion University – like all our universities – has on its graduates. Coach Cal is an extraordinary guy. You will not meet anyone more charismatic, more engaging, than he is. He lights up a room, fills it with laughter, memories, and parables drawn from an extraordinary and still vibrant career. Calipari is also a deeply humble person who is attached to his working-class roots in Western Pennsylvania and is committed and grateful to his mentors and friends and the countless people he has met along the way, and the institutions through which he has travelled. Memories shared that evening were raucous, endearing, powerful – some sad; all of them built up from the strongest of bonds that form between people working together to improve themselves so that they, in turn, can improve the world around them. Most of the bonds I witnessed that evening were forged on the grounds and in the residence halls, classrooms, and sports facilities of Clarion University – reminding me once more how our universities change lives, even save a few. Coach Cal is an extraordinary example of the power and promise of Pennsylvania’s public higher education. And while he is unique in so many ways, he also represents the best of who we are, what we do, what we can do, and what we need to do for the people of this Commonwealth.

The revelation is not new. It happens routinely in countless conversations with alumni of all ages, from all our universities, from Mansfield to California, and Edinboro to West Chester. With tremendous and candid authenticity and passion, alumni tell me how their university lifted them up – often from humble origins – setting them on a course that changed their lives and the lives of their families. Alumni tell me about universities’ roles as engines of opportunity for people in surrounding counties – often counties where opportunities are in short supply – about the widespread affection for the university mascot and all the memories it represents, and about the history and tradition of their university.

We do so much for so many but are we satisfying the needs of our Commonwealth and our employers, too? Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit the head of a Commonwealth agency who informed me that half of the employees in his agency are eligible to retire today. Within three years this figure will swell to 70 percent. He asked, “where will I find replacements if not at State System schools?” Where indeed, I thought, reflecting on the number of elected representatives, staffers, and agency employees I have met who are State System university alumni and who speak openly, proudly, and with the endearing affection that Coach Cal displayed towards his alma mater. This conversation, too, I have had countless times with employers and employer associations, chamber of commerce members and not-for-profit leaders who want to know where they will find the employees they need with the right mix of skills and competencies. Opportunities to reskill and upskill people whose jobs are threatened by dramatic and ongoing changes in the labor market is yet another pressing concern.

The need for a better-educated workforce is urgent – today, 60 percent of all jobs in Pennsylvania require people with some form of higher education. Still, only 50 percent of adults in the state have that education. The need for a better-educated workforce is widespread – it extends from the trades and services into agribusiness, financial services, IT, advanced manufacture, healthcare, energy, education. And the need for a better-educated workforce is growing. By 2030, the proportion of jobs requiring a college degree will grow by 5.5 percent for associate’s, 8.1 percent for bachelor’s, 15.7 percent for master’s, and 6 percent for doctorates. Newsflash: the burden of providing a better-educated workforce lands most heavily on public two- and four-year institutions. Quite simply, most jobs that need filling will be supplied by our universities, not by elite and flagship colleges and universities. Nothing at all against them. They are critical to our national well-being, albeit in different ways than are public regional universities. But elite institutions will at best provide 20 percent of all higher education credentials minted in any given year. No, most jobs that go begging for educated workers will be filled disproportionately by graduates of regional public universities (enrolling 25 percent of all higher education students) and community colleges (40 percent). If public education stumbles, so do national, state, and regional economies.

And signs of stumbling are disturbingly apparent in this Commonwealth where the price of public higher education is extremely high. Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation in terms of public investment per student full-time equivalent (46th if you look at investment in public four-year universities like our State System universities). It is 7th highest in terms of price to students (measured in revenue generated through student tuition and fees), and it has the 2nd highest graduating student debt rate of all states. These signs of stumbling are not a random co-occurrence of numbers. There are direct relationships between them. As states divest from public higher education, the cost borne by enrolled students grows, as does student debt load. The net result is twofold. Students stop enrolling in higher education – low- and middle-income students in particular. They are priced out of pursuing their future. And Pennsylvania falls further and further behind in satisfying employer demand for educated workers.

Thus, over the last decade, higher education enrollments of PA state high-school graduates have fallen consistently behind national averages. Worse, because we are not producing the skilled workforce our employers need, Pennsylvania’s unemployment ranking, which was 24th nationally a decade ago, is now 42nd, meaning fewer people are finding work here. The jobs are here (for now). The educated workers needed to fill them are not. And all of this because we are not willing as a Commonwealth to invest what is needed to maintain affordable pathways into and through higher education. Penny wise, pound foolish, the English would say. Why? Because employers lacking the talent they need in one state or region of the country will simply move those jobs to other states or regions. Because people seeking affordable pathways into sustaining careers will go out of state to find them, and those students who leave Pennsylvania in search of more affordable education – well, they are unlikely to return and contribute to the state’s economy and communities.

Yes, of course, we could recruit more students from out of state to make up the numbers, but price factors in here also. Did you know that it would cost Pennsylvania an additional $300 million/year in direct-to-student (grant in aid) dollars to bring the net price of attendance paid by a Pennsylvania resident at a State System university in line with the average in-state-student price that applies in public (state-owned) schools in the five contiguous states? $300 million! The state didn’t build a gap that large without working at it – for years. The long-term impacts these imbalances have on our state’s economy are, bluntly, devastating. Ugh. And did I mention that we can’t build the educated labor force we need on the back of affluent Pennsylvanians who can still afford higher education? Sorry. I omitted that point. Yup. It’s a mathematical improbability. There are not enough affluent Pennsylvanians around to fill the seats on the Pennsylvania workforce bus. There are a lot of reasons that we have strived historically as a nation to democratize educational opportunity – this is one of them.

Do State System universities need to be part of the solution? Technically speaking, no. They don’t. This is a statewide policy problem, not strictly speaking a PASSHE problem. Policymakers could agree to introduce tax and other incentives to “import” talent from other states. Possible, but a heavy lift. Pennsylvania is a modest net gainer with respect to inward migration, but its current tax structure favors retirees who won’t help address talent gaps in the labor market. Alternatively, policymakers could invest in creating affordable pathways at other higher education institutions – it’s not like there’s a shortage of them to choose from in Pennsylvania. And if there is dissatisfaction with existing supply, there are any number of out-of-state providers who would be more than happy to help, and there’s always an opportunity to invest in wholly new start-up options.

Having said all that, I hope policymakers will recognize PASSHE’s significant advantages and will consider it seriously as part of the solution to the Commonwealth’s chronic and structural talent gap. Honestly, as a predicate, I hope policymakers take seriously the fact that there is a talent gap that, if left unaddressed, will have serious and detrimental consequences for our state.

• As the most affordable pathway into and through four-year education, the net cost to the state for each additional degree produced will be lower than at any other institution. If we further strengthen community college transfer pathways, offering both students and the state the most cost-efficient means of producing more degrees, this is particularly true.
• State System universities are proudly PA. Fully 90 percent of our students are residents of the Commonwealth, and 65 percent of our graduates are found living and working here ten years after graduating (nearly three-quarters of graduates who enroll from lower-income families or transfer to a PASSHE university from a community college).
• State System graduates meet employer needs. Our degree programs have evolved over time to emphasize high-demand areas like STEM, health, business, and education. Data also highlights how graduates from all program areas from Arts and Humanities to STEM find jobs and earn good salaries.
• State System universities are transparent and accountable to the people who pay their bills – to our students who contribute 71 percent of our total revenues and taxpayers who contribute the other 29 percent. Simply speaking, you know what you get for every dollar you spend on a State System university. Seriously. Thanks to the state grant program administered by PHEAA, virtually every college and university in this state benefits from some taxpayer support, and all derive most of their revenues from students. But, other than PASSHE schools, which institutions publish graduates’ expected earnings, tell you about retention and graduation rates and how these vary for different student groups, reveal their labor (and labor productivity) costs, and benchmark their numbers against comparator institutions nationwide? The answer is none. Zero. Nada. Zip. Forget my role as Chancellor. As a Pennsylvania resident and the parent of one consuming a PA-based education, I am disturbed by our apparent willingness to invest taxpayers’ money blindly and hold institutions who receive them to very different standards of accountability and transparency. Out of respect for and in honor of the hard-earned student and taxpayer dollars that support our operations, the State System holds itself to the highest standards of transparency and accountability – arguably higher than anywhere in the nation.
• State System universities are well managed. When I first arrived in Pennsylvania, I learned from stakeholders that we had a lot of work to do in this area, from developing reliable budgets and budget forecasts to curtailing price increases for students and to getting our arms around our universities’ unique challenges. And from the General Assembly, I heard (and believed) a general willingness to invest in a properly managed and highly accountable State System. With courageous leadership from our Board of Governors and our universities, we have responded to each and every one of the real concerns that were expressed. And here we are three years later, having listened, promised to improve, and delivered. A precis follows.

• We are achieving the cost reductions we promised. By June 2022, we will have eliminated $173 million in cost over two years – well along the way to delivering the $200-250 million reductions we promised over five years. We have aligned our employee base with our enrollments. By June 2022, we will achieve the two-year targets we set in spring 2020, and we will re-establish two-year targets in fall 2022 to take account of new enrollment and revenue realities. Why this last action? Board policy requires financially sustaining operations of all our universities, and that policy is enforced.
• The last three years during which the Board has kept tuition flat, we have reduced upward pressure on student tuition and fees by cutting ourselves $160 million a year ($100 million distributed annually from operating funds as student financial aid and $60 million in foregone tuition revenues). From 2011-2018, the average net price that a student paid to attend a university (including tuition, fees, room and board) increased by an average of 5.5 percent a year. Since 2019, that increase has been 0 percent. Flat-lined.
• We have gotten our arms around our most enrollment-challenged schools, setting them on a path down which they can serve both students and their communities in a financially responsible manner. The work is as hard as it is necessary – often resulting in transformational restructuring – but it is also effective and allows us to maintain opportunities for students across the entire state. Cheyney University’s very existence was once severely threatened, but thanks to diligence and creativity, its accreditation is secured, its debt to other System universities paid off, and the university is operating in a financially stable manner. IUP is now implementing an exciting next-generation strategy – building back stronger than ever to meet the needs of the region, the state, and the nation. And campuses comprising the new and exciting “Penn West” university (California, Clarion, and Edinboro) and those in our yet-to-be-named northeastern integration (Bloomsburg, Lock Haven, Mansfield) are building regional powerhouses to serve both traditional and new student groups.
• We have introduced and are making progress in advancing an aggressive strategy that will ensure that all our students feel welcomed on our campuses and have every opportunity to succeed – irrespective of their zip code, race/ethnicity, gender identity, and political and world views.
• State System universities demonstrate the power of public higher education as an engine of economic development (discussed above) and a driver of social mobility. In partnership with the PA Department of Labor and Industry, we have analyzed student earnings 1, 3, 5, and 10 years after graduating from a PA State System university. The project has taken a long time to complete (we’re not slow – the work is complex), so you can imagine I was waiting with eager anticipation when our crack analytics team showed me initial results. And what results! Low-income students who enroll in a PASSHE university earn nearly as much as those who initially enrolled as high-income students. The same levelling-up effects exist when the data are analyzed by race/ ethnicity. Five and ten years after graduating, underrepresented minority students from low-income families are doing about as well as white graduates who enrolled as higher-income students. There are earning gaps in the averages amounting to as much as 15 percent ten years after graduation but considering that the income differences at enrollment could be as 5x or more, that’s an impressive testimony to the power that public education has as an engine of social mobility.

For all these reasons, the Board of Governors approved a highly unusual set of annual state appropriations actions. First, the Board approved a $550 million General Fund appropriations request (a figure that reflects the actual cost of running the system, assuming it is operating sustainably). Second, it encouraged our advocacy supporting $200M in direct-to-student funding. A fully funded request would enable us to put higher education back in reach of the low- and middle-income families that our universities have historically served and who we need to better serve if our economy is to remain strong.

Are there expectations attached to these funding requests? Yes, of course, there are. Public higher education is a partnership between universities and the state. The state’s part in that partnership is to support us appropriately. Our part is to make sure we use hard-earned taxpayer and student dollars effectively, in ways that are responsive to student, community, employer demand – demands that our elected representatives in the General Assembly routinely express. Our priorities for our ongoing System Redesign reflect these expectations. Expectations include our continued sustainable, accountable, and transparent operations, to be sure. As a requirement of Board policy, our universities will operate in a sustainable manner, continuing to adjust expenditure and program array in response to enrollment trends. Even more importantly, expectations include our continued efforts to expand student opportunities – efforts which, thanks to a bipartisan coalition in the General Assembly and the Wolf administration, we can advance with a commitment of $200 million in one-time funding.

Expanding student opportunities is the only means of increasing credentialing productivity and meeting the Commonwealth workforce needs. It does not, let me be clear, entail a return to yesteryear. As I wrote in last month’s blog, colleges and universities that pursue a post-pandemic path back to the past do so at their peril. Our post-pandemic path follows strategic directions pursued by our universities as part of our System’s redesign and the successes we are beginning to show for them. Those directions are responsive to the changing world around us; they are built on core competencies (yes, we definitely can) and have featured so frequently in my blog posts and public pronouncements that they will not be a surprise to anyone. They focus on:

• strengthening community college and high school pipelines and improving retention and graduation rates for both traditional and new student groups
• expanding support for under-served students, including adult students, students seeking non-degree credentials in areas that leverage existing program strengths, and students seeking fully online programs)
• ensuring our university communities support success for all their members, including closing access and attainment gaps that persist for underrepresented minority and rural students
• successfully implementing university integrations – designed from the start to expand student opportunities
• ensuring our educational programs remain responsive to market needs and enrollment and demographic trends, and they are available to students across the state with minimal inefficient redundancy.

Moving forward effectively on our post-pandemic path will require us to work together, to leverage our core competencies as we evolve them, and to maintain our financial stability. Like those raucous, endearing, and powerful memories Coach Cal shared, it will take the strongest of bonds between members of our extended communities – faculty, staff, and students, of course, but also our trustees, alumni networks, and business and other leaders from the regions we serve. Working together we can and we will evolve fundamentally in many respects in order that we may continue to pursue our historic mission as an engine of social mobility and economic development. Working together, we can and we will make our case for additional institutional and direct-to-student funding to our partner and owner, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And here is where we can use your help. Right now. Today. Whether you are a student, faculty/staff member, trustee, or a graduate, you can speak to the powerful positive impacts that a State System education has on people, communities, economies.

Every month, you can join us in sharing why extraordinary state support is critical for student success and the economic and social vitality of Pennsylvania’s communities and the Commonwealth.

The time is critical, the time is now, the time is ours.

Learn more here about our #Together4PASSHE advocacy campaign.

Challenging old norms

A tremendous thanks to our heroes—students, faculty, and staff—for enabling a return to something approximating normal campus operations. Without your patience, understanding, and more importantly the care, respect, and courtesy you show one another by masking, getting vaccinated in the interest of personal and public health, our universities could not possibly have done this.

Eventually, this pandemic will recede or become endemic and part of the fabric of our lives. As it does, it is hard to not think about our future—the future of higher education generally—and the choices we are making today that will shape it. Inspired by summer reading, let me offer a few thoughts and, as always, invite your feedback, which you can share by contacting me at chancellor@passhe.edu.

The transformation of our nation’s universities will proceed incrementally, then all at once. That is the conclusion reached independently (for the United States) by Levine and Van Pelt in The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future and (for Oceania) by a team of futurists at EY Parthenon in “The Peak of Higher Education: A New World for the University of the Future” Incremental change has been a feature of our lives for decades. Will the pandemic be an accelerant into hyperdrive? The significant shifts we are seeing in enrollment patterns and in student preferences with respect to instructional modality, regional location, available student services, and credentialing type suggest we are (see Hanover Research, Kirschner, and Credential Engine).

Responding to these shifts, universities and colleges across the country will undoubtedly accelerate the pace of transformation, even where responses are intended as short-term expediencies to navigate a hyper-competitive market for student enrollments. And yes, those responses are already apparent. The persistence of test-optional admissions is a good example. So is the growing emphasis on job-readiness at traditional degree-granting colleges and universities. This includes expansion in experiential learning opportunities and an explosion in the number of non-degree credentials. And one cannot ignore the emergence of mass-market platforms such as LinkedIn’s Learning Hub that have potential to encroach significantly on the near monopoly that the degree-granting institutions have traditionally held over post-secondary education. 

Kirschner’s reflections on the “omni-channel” university is as fascinating. For some time, universities have offered multi-modal degree programs including fully on-ground, fully online, and even some hybrid formats (most evident in executive post-baccalaureate degrees). The omni-channel university goes a step further taking multi-modality to the scheduled class level. In this regard, it continues an approach that emerged during the pandemic as a matter of necessity—one where students living on or near campus could choose daily whether to attend a scheduled class in person or remotely by Zoom, or in some circumstances to engage fully in the online instantiation of a course’s relevant learning objectives.

The thought of maintaining the omni-channel university makes my brain hurt. At the same time, it is tremendously exciting. It affords us the opportunity of personalizing educational offerings at the scheduled class and learning outcome (rather than the program or even course) levels. More importantly, it responds directly to student preferences, which together cry out for the deepest kind of “personalization”—that is, the ability to combine curricular and co-curricular experiences in a way that suits the student’s particular needs, circumstances, and learning styles.

I first noticed it here at home during student focus groups that I conducted last year during virtual campus visits. Yes, students pretty much uniformly expressed an intense desire for a full “return to campus” (not surprising—these students had enrolled by choice in an on-campus experience, not a fully online one). But they also brought diverse perspectives to what “return to campus” should entail. A student-athlete whose schedule was consumed by training and the resultant search for fuel needed flexibility day-by-day to determine how to engage in scheduled courses. She represented a broader group whose life schedules required them to accommodate pressing and evolving priorities—athletics, work, family—as well as higher education, and preferring to decide daily rather than committing wholly to one modality or another. Others yearned intently to get “back to class,” but to continue some non- or co-curricular aspects of their educational experience remotely, e.g., 1:1 support services and/or basic administrative and business functions. And yearning to get “back to class” turned out also meant different things to different students. Some didn’t like or had trouble learning in remote modalities and wanted face-to-face experiences uniformly across the board. Others wanted some of their courses face-to-face (e.g., lab sciences and performing arts and/or courses contributing credits towards their major), but actually preferred other courses remotely. 

My take away from these focus group discussions had absolutely nothing to do with the relative strengths and weaknesses of different educational delivery modalities. Rather it revealed how, in a world that increasingly skews to the personalization of everything, universities and colleges still emphasize a very traditional “few-sizes-fit-all” approach. Quaint, perhaps, but I’m not convinced that “quaint” will continue much longer as our strongest selling point. Given the dramatic shifts referenced above in demographic patterns and student preferences—and the intensity that those shifts will inject into an already hyper-competitive marketplace—a race to re-establish the “old normal” is likely to be catastrophic. Beware reactionary traditionalist approaches to pandemic recovery. As an industry (and as a society), we will eventually “return to normal,” but that normal will look a lot different than the one we knew in March 2020.

Under the heading of challenging old norms, let me suggest that Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” (1963) is a must-read. It is short, accessible, powerful. A scathing critique of persistent racial injustice, it offers advice to Black men and boys about how to navigate oppression and survive as well as recipes for dismantling systemic racism. Re-reading this essay (it featured originally as a co-curricular component of my high school education), I was overwhelmed by searing anger, profound sadness, and shame. Prepare to weep, not cry. But I also put it down feeling uplifted with a renewed sense of hope. Claude’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lesson for Our Own (2020) provides another opportunity to think about these critical issues during Baldwin’s time and our own.  Both reads also reinforced how our State System’s emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion is 1.) more important now than ever, and 2.) the right thing to do for all members of our communities.

Like Genovese’s work on the Antebellum South (Roll, Jordon Roll), Baldwin reminds us that the social (non-biological) construction of race, systemic and pervasive racism, and relentless racial injustice are constructs that define, diminish, disempower, and de-humanize everyone. The fact that Black and Brown students graduate and retain at far lower rates than other students, is not a Black and Brown problem. It is our problem. The fact that Black and Brown students are made to feel uncomfortable on our campuses through routine micro-aggressions and occasional full-on racial attacks—discomfort that, by the way, contributes directly to lower than average enrollment, retention, and graduation rates—does not testify to hypersensitivity or progressive political tendency.  It reflects our inhumanity, worse—given its persistence—our apparent willingness and ability to tolerate intolerance.  

Yes, I understand that intolerance is once again a defining feature of our nation’s political discourse; as Anderson shows us in Fantasyland, this is a feature not a bug in American political culture. It characterizes newly-minted forms of tribalism (perhaps in a revised edition of Lord of the Flies, the presence or absence of masks or COVID-19 vaccines will be the defining characteristic of the island’s ascendant and ultimately murderous tribes). All the more reason for universities to take a stand and fight the trend, to shape a better future by modeling healthier and more civil discourse that honors and respects differences in opinion, world view, culture, upbringing, race, gender, identity, and more. 

I also spent time this summer with “Equitable Value” (the report of the Postsecondary Value Commission), which shines a harsh light on the extent to which student outcomes in U.S. higher education reflect and reproduce inequity, and Grawe’s  The Agile College, a catalog of evidence-based “interventions” that universities can use to reduce those inequities. Reading them, I was struck by how the two themes elaborated in this blog collide to potentially incredible positive effect. Equipping ourselves to personalize the educational experiences we offer naturally and necessarily forces us to comprehend and engage effectively with diversity writ large. A direction we travel to remain relevant (frankly to survive as education providers) in a world where student demographics and preferences are rapidly changing, reinforces and draws from one we pursue in the interest of racial and social justice. The two strategies intertwine to become one. That’s a good thing. Aligning effort sharpens focus, amplifies impact, and promises real and lasting progress in two areas. First, we have a chance to ensure Pennsylvania maintains a robust economy—lifting the adult education rate from its present anemic value of around 50% to the required value of 60%. News flash: this is mathematically improbable unless we address issues of equity and social mobility. Second, we have an opportunity, finally, to make real and lasting progress against racial inequities that exist across higher education in the United States, albeit 400-plus years since the first slaves were brought to the western hemisphere, nearly 160 years after The Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. Maybe this time.

Let me offer one last thought as a shameless trailer for my October blog, yet still in keeping with the theme of challenging old norms. We are uniquely positioned to succeed in the transformative work that lies ahead—transformative work that is essential to fulfilling our historic mission into the 21^st century in the interest of our students, their communities, and the Commonwealth. We have, in short order, put ourselves on a path to financial stabilization, re-framed our partnership with the Commonwealth, and—through our collective work on System Redesign—developed and financed a number of high-impact strategies that will enable us to navigate the challenges outlined above. Perhaps as importantly we are positioned to build our future on our enormous existing strengths. These are a legion of strengths, but let me focus on two.

The transformative work is hard, but it is worth it for our students and the Commonwealth. This will become evident in data we will be releasing this fall. They testify to the enormous value we offer our graduates who are rewarded for the investments they make in a State System education. The data also demonstrate the value we offer to the state as an engine of Pennsylvania’s economic development and its people’s social mobility.  There is evidence that a State System university reduces inequities which are smaller amongst our graduates than they are amongst our enrollees.

The transformative work needn’t be de novo, conducted entirely in green fields.

It will be built upon core competencies, including our tremendous agility. After what we have pulled off in the wake of a global pandemic, no one can credibly claim that higher education is unresponsive, change resistant. We are tired—all of us—but I hope we are also tremendously proud of who we are, what we have done, what we continue to do under the most trying circumstances for our students, their employers, our communities.

It will also be built upon existing initiatives and strategic university investments that are already bearing fruit across the system in areas we know we must excel. A few examples, but please, the list is nothing like exhaustive so forgive omissions: it includes progress strengthening transfer student pipelines (e.g., at West Chester); expanding high-school dual enrollment opportunities (e.g., at Mansfield); improving traditional students’ retention and graduation rates (e.g., at Kutztown); making university communities more welcoming for all students (e.g., at East Stroudsburg); making progress against equity gaps (e.g., at Shippensburg); expanding non-degree credentialing opportunities in partnership with employers (e.g., in the northeast integration); forging partnerships to expand student internships and externships (e.g., at Cheyney), and expanding fully online opportunities to those seeking undergraduate degrees (e.g., in the western integration).
 
It will be built—it can only be built—upon expanded investment of our owners, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and we are committed to make that happen.

Renewal

This is my favorite time of year. In so many ways. Days are long (and so are bike rides), everything is in full bloom, and those of us fortunate enough to work in education are rolling up our sleeves and preparing with excited anticipation for the sun to rise on a new academic year. I have spent an entire life in and around higher education, experiencing this aspect of its annual biorhythm, and I have never been more excited, more filled with anticipation, optimism, and joy than I am today, for a confluence of reasons.  

In a few weeks all of our universities will return full bore—and with eagerness and energy—to their on-campus operations. Like you, I have waited so long for this moment, through so many months of uncertainty. And now the moment is finally here.   

I was at Slippery Rock last week for a meeting and watched out the window as members of the football team (already on campus) left the dining hall after lunch. This totally normal and typically unremarkable early-August university sighting had a tremendous impact on me for what it meant, for what it said about where we’ve been, how much we’ve missed, and where we’re headed—at long last. I hasten to add that I do not expect higher education (or our universities) to chart a course back to the exact place it stood in March, 2020. We will likely be negotiating the pandemic for some while longer, and we should expect it to have lingering effects on our operations, on the rules governing how we interact with one another, and also on the way we provide and support university education. 

An important aside—all of us will continue to bear responsibility for our own health as well as for the health of those around us. Getting vaccinated (as I strongly urge you to do), wearing masks, and social distancing in some settings are all responsibilities we share. We are a family, and a family is more than a collection of people each pursuing their individual interests without giving a thought about how those pursuits impact others. Ours are university communities, not Hobbesian states of nature. I will also be fascinated to see over the next few years how and where we make permanent any new practices we were forced to adopt by pandemic necessity.   

The opportunities in this new year are tremendously exciting and offer a sense of relief to have turned the page on the pandemic’s last chapter; even joy to see people in person and not on a zoom screen. Yes, of course, some trepidation exists because the course of this pandemic remains unpredictable and uncertain. But overwhelmingly there is a sense of renewal, renaissance—watching that sun rise.     

In a few weeks, two groups of three universities each will begin the long process of integrating their tremendous and distinctive strengths to build educational powerhouses in two regions of our state—the northeast and the west, respectively. Their goals are simple yet in so many ways audacious: expand affordable educational opportunities for all Pennsylvanians, improve students’ outcomes, continue and grow economic, cultural, and other contributions to their host communities and regions. As these efforts move from planning to implementation, I’m infused with a sense of excitement and enthusiasm that is only growing amongst those whose sleeves are rolled up, whose hands are building a better future, whose minds are reviewing and, where necessary, refreshing our practices so they reflect and serve the needs of our students, their communities, future employers.     

The opportunities associated with our integrations are tremendously exciting. Relief to be past the abstract and often unsettling planning stage. Joy to be building. Yes, of course, some trepidation (this work is hard), but offering another kind of renewal, renaissance—watching that sun rise.    

In a few weeks, we will begin to invest new one-time dollars, using them to support innovation that will secure a brighter future for our students and strengthen our universities as engines of the Commonwealth’s economic and workforce development, social mobility, and equity. Yes, of course, all of our universities have continued to invest in their futures even through the most challenging of times. But in the coming year we have an incredible opportunity to advance that work in a powerful coordinated fashion—an opportunity made possible through the leadership of Governor Wolf and a bi-partisan coalition in the General Assembly that has committed $200 million to the system over a three-year period. They believe, as I do, that this system and the benefits it bestows on the people of this Commonwealth are worth fighting for, worth investing in, worth partnering around to accomplish.     

The new state investment, coupled with an additional $100M generated by the System’s pre-payment of its SERS pension obligations, provides us with a $300 million multi-year war chest of one-time funding that, if used strategically and not consumed by recurrent operations (a lesson that higher ed learned the hard way after the Great Recession in its use of ARRA funds), we can significantly: 

• advance our System Redesign goals focusing in particular on growth (improving outcomes for current students, expanding pipelines for new ones, (adults and students seeking fully online and non-degree options, respectively), and ensuring our university communities are welcoming and supportive environments for all their members, and
• support our universities that need to transition to sustainable operations, including our newly integrated ones—their success is critical to the health of the System overall. 

Detailed investment objectives are being developed in consultation with the Board of Governors, the university presidents and other stakeholders and will be presented to the Board in October.

A couple of points are worth some further reflection:  

First, the state’s unprecedented investment in the State System reflects the hard work we have done together, strengthening the General Assembly’s trust in our operations and their significance. Amongst other things, it involved: 

• radical transparency about our operations and their impacts—strengths as well as weaknesses; opportunities as well as challenges;
• deliberate and concerted efforts to manage to our new enrollment realities and to operate in ways that did not continue to heap increased cost upon students who can ill afford them; 
• a willingness and commitment on our part to address (not just talk about) our most difficult challenges – attainment gaps that persist between white, black, and brown students; campus communities that are not consistently inclusive and welcoming of all their members; the persistence of unsustainable operating models that were beginning to threaten the system as a whole;
• educational efforts documenting the vital role higher education (PA State System Universities included) plays in the future of this Commonwealth, and the critical importance of ensuring affordable options are available to all Pennsylvanians; and
• building coalitions between people who share a common genuine interest in viable public higher education but have very different views about how best to   achieve their common goal.  

Second, the investment results in part from having very deliberately aligned our advocacy efforts across the System, enlisting the influence and voice of our collective bargaining units, trustees, and university and Board leadership. This lesson is particularly potent. It demonstrates we do well when we work together with a sense of urgency. Imagine what we will accomplish applying the same approach to the re-invigoration, re-imagination, and re-investment that is now becoming possible for the first time in quite a while.   

Third, the confluence of exciting opportunities represented in this blog creates a kind of watershed moment. Think about the scope of the co-occurrence:

• return to campus after more than a year away for many; 
• establishment of two wholly new universities built in partnership upon the tremendous, historic, and distinctive strengths of three regional treasures, and seeking deliberately to design themselves around today’s and tomorrow’s students; 
• significant new investment—the first of its kind in decades—that we can focus strategically on our future, our students, our growth; 
• a stronger partnership with our elected leaders.  

Should we choose to, we can take advantage of this co-occurrence and begin to change the narrative that has surrounded the State System and its universities for too long—a narrative that contributes to its challenges (the System was characterized in a recent Chronicle article as a “whipping post” enabling the state to ignore more systemic challenges). Given all that we have accomplished and all that lies ahead, our universities are the place to be in public higher education today—actively re-imagining what the 21st century university can and ought to look like; building on historic strengths while innovating aggressively in the interest of our students and this Commonwealth. Aligning around that message, working together to take full advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead—that too is a choice. I know what message I want to pursue. But my voice is not strong enough on its own, which is why I ask you to join me in making our case to any remaining skeptics to demonstrate what I have always believed (and in fact observed) to be true – that there is nothing we cannot accomplish if we choose to work together...e pluribus unum indeed.   

Once again, relief to see a light at the end of a very long tunnel. Joy to begin building—focusing on growth. Yes, of course, some trepidation because the path to our success requires continuous and often discomforting change, community cultivation, and alignment. But overwhelmingly a sense of renewal, renaissance, rolling up sleeves, and working together to help that sun rise. 

University Integrations Update

I thought it important to use this blog space to update everyone on the proposed university integrations that the Board of Governors will consider this week. Included below is some information about how the plans have been revised to respond to issues that came forward during the public comment period.

The public review process has been a good one, and I am grateful to the framers of Act 50 for thinking of it, and for writing it into the legislation. Through the comment period, we have identified stakeholder needs and priorities we would have missed and learned what we needed to revise or clarify.

Key outcomes are summarized below. They are all important, but perhaps the most significant is saved to the end and has to do with the much-strengthened coalition that the process has produced in support of our System Redesign. (Those who are tired of wading through the details of integration planning may want to take a shortcut to that destination.)

Extended the timeline for “curriculum integration” by up to an additional two years

The plans as submitted in April included information about the “academic program array”—the degrees, majors, minors, and areas of concentration that will be available in the new university.

What remains is to determine the curriculum—the requirements and courses for each academic program and in what modalities those courses will be taught. And it is this—the process for determining the curriculum—that has been extended over a period of up to three years, using a phased approach, likely beginning with the General Education curriculum and moving on from there.

Why are we making this change? Because we listened during the public review period.

• We listened to faculty who urged more time so they could develop a better, more thoughtfully crafted curriculum.
• We listened to current and prospective students who wanted greater clarity about their paths to graduation.

Associated milestones for related aspects of the plan—technology integration, student recruitment and enrollment strategies—will be adjusted to support the phased-in curriculum development, review, and implementation. There will be no impact on the Middle States submission process, the appointment of integration leadership teams, or the start-date of the integrated entity.

Clarified use of online learning

Students will have face-to-face instruction and residential, in-person student experiences at integrated entities. They are defending and improving it while ensuring it remains at all our universities. Use of online will be modest for our residential students and entirely in keeping with their observed behaviors and preferences. Let me review:

• the entire general education curriculum will be available face-to-face for all students;
• based on current student enrollments and the academic program array, 75 percent of students are enrolled in degree programs (majors, minors, areas of concentrate) that will have faculty and face-to-face instruction at their campus; and
• no student will need to travel to pursue their course of study.

Where fully online and hybrid modalities are used, they will align with industry best practices that show promising, often improved outcomes for all students. Let’s be honest with ourselves. The relatively passive use of Zoom that proliferated during the pandemic does not constitute best practices in online or hybrid learning. It reflects heroic efforts made by dedicated faculty in the face of a national emergency to ensure students continued their educational progress while universities protected the health and safety of their communities. In the face of incredible odds, this was a tremendous success. Kudos (and heartfelt thanks) to all.

Best-of-breed online and hybrid approaches are different. According to Every Learner Everywhere—a network of organizations dedicated to helping higher education use new technology to innovate teaching and learning with the goal of improving outcomes for all students, they:

• are built upon years of learning science, extensive student engagement and participation data, continued innovation in technology capabilities (extending to “adaptive courseware” —learning platforms that adapt themselves to individual students’ learning needs, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality).
• leverage sophisticated learning design techniques, incorporate active learning and real time learner feedback loops that demonstrably improve student outcomes (disproportionately for at-risk students);
• are bolstered by extensive investment in faculty professional development and student supports as well as in technology—investments, the modified plan clarifies, we intend to make.
• Integrating such approaches, universities such as Arizona State, Georgia State University, and the University of Central Florida were demonstrating improved student access and outcomes as early as 2018. Since then, the list of exemplars has only grown as has the power of evidence based online learning.

Online and hybrid learning is not an outlier. It is a mainstream of higher education.

• Demand for online learning is growing in Pennsylvania. According to the Distance Education Almanac, in Pennsylvania enrollments in fully online programs grew 39 percent between 2012 and 2019 (32 percent nationally). During this same time the number of on-campus students declined by 14.2 percent (10.3 percent nationally).
• Fully 50,000 Pennsylvanians in 2019 enrolled in a fully online program offered by an out of state provider, according to NC-SARA data, and this despite the preference online students show for enrolling in programs offered at a nearby institution (75 percent of online college students live within 50 miles of their homes).

Our students (and their parents) expect—and want to engage in—at least some online courses.

A survey of 1300 respondents including current and prospective PASSHE university students and parents (taking in respondents from both integrating and non-integrating schools) demonstrated that the overwhelming majority are willing to take up to 25 percent of their courses online in pursuit of the following objectives:

• Wider range of degrees and majors
• Quicker time to degree
• Lower overall cost of degree

Analyzed economic impacts of integration

Integration will have a positive economic impact on the regions in question: 8.1 percent greater in the west than if the three universities were to continue operating independently; 1.9 percent in the northeast.

So says a study commissioned from professionals steeped in the science of community impact studies and available here.

Diminished economic impact of our universities 2014-20 resulted primarily from decline in student spending, not headcount reduction. The economic impact of our universities did decline 2014-20 by 9.5 percent due almost entirely to decline in student spending (significant at universities that lost 40-50 percent of their enrollments over a decade, as is the case at five of our six integrating schools), and a change in the multiplier used nationally in the conduct of such studies. Employee headcount reduction—itself a reaction to enrollment decline—barely factored in the diminished economic impact. This is in part because salaries increased over the period, and in part because the vast majority of reductions were achieved through retirement and natural attrition—not furloughs and retrenchments.

Universities’ pursuit of balanced budget operations is required by Board policy. It is independent of integration and will continue whether we integrate or not. Why is that policy in place? Because balanced budget operations, always a good practice, took on a degree of urgency for the System from the mid-2010s as universities that did not adjust their expenditures to reflect their new enrollment realities began drawing down on the scarce resources that would otherwise have been available to others. The process, if left unchecked, threatened the financial integrity of the System as a whole and the viability of up to half or more of its universities.

Other adjustments and clarifications

These are numerous and address important issues that emerged through public comment. A brief tour is provided below—a fuller inventory can be found here and, of course, in the updated plans available for the northeast and west.

• Financial projections
• Transitional financial protections are available for integrating universities to ensure their reserves are not impacted by debts incurred by partner institutions before integration.
• Financial projections are reforecast and improved, taking account of the above protections as well as new information (e.g., about flat tuition voted by the Board in April 2021 and the availability of federal COVID relief dollars).
• A third party has reviewed and validated assumptions in our financial projections.
• The source and level of savings expected from integration are made explicit.

• Governance and organization
• An integrated entity cannot and will not cease operations at or close a partner institution. That authority shall remain exclusively with the General Assembly.
• Recommendations made by leadership and governance working groups about the structure of integrated universities’ Councils of Trustees are included along with a recommendation that if integration be approved, stakeholders be convened to identify a preferred model and If necessary pursue legislative changes required to implement it.
• The structure and operation of university leadership teams is explained in greater detail, including the role of “campus executives” [working title]—leadership team members combining a functional portfolio (e.g., Chief Academic Officer) with responsibility for vital relationship building, ceremonial, and other related functions in the president’s absence.
• Integration will not impact the governance of or assets belonging to university affiliates, including foundations.

• Process
• Detail is provided about critical next steps including the accreditation process (and related engagement with other regulatory and accrediting bodies) as well as near term milestones such as the development of detailed organizational charts, detailed plans for curriculum integration, technology integration, development of student-facing systems, enrollment management and marketing strategies, etc.

Revised plans do not address issues that were repeatedly raised, but are not grounded in the reality of our situation:

• A vote to integrate does not require a nod from Middle States and NCAA. It cannot. Middle States won’t consider the matter until the board votes; NCAA will require similar assurances.
• The integration process has not lacked transparency. Every step along the way is exhaustively documented on the web; deliberations and debate are carried publicly in board meetings, legislative testimony, and hearings; engagement in the process has been encouraged and invited through aggressively-mounted marketing campaigns and countless meetings formally and informally with all stakeholder groups.

Building the coalition for System Redesign

Perhaps the greatest single outcome resulting from the public review process has been the opportunity it afforded to build the coalition we will need to affect not only university integration but the overall redesign of our system, ensuring that it sustainably provides high-quality, career-relevant education to all Pennsylvanians, across all Pennsylvania, now and into the future.

Critical to that coalition is the System’s partnership with the state—a partnership I have been writing, speaking, and testifying about for nearly three years. In that partnership, universities, as recipients of taxpayer dollars are responsible for:

• reducing the burden both on taxpayers and our students (who in our case pick up 75 percent of our total costs).
• responding with alacrity and chronic innovation to changing student, employer, and community needs, technology innovation, and the evolution of learning science.
• ensuring they are diverse communities representing at every level the complexion of the people of this state, are welcoming and inclusive of and produce equitable outcomes for all our members irrespective of race, creed, gender orientation, and zip code.

The state’s responsibility is to support us in a manner that allows us to fulfill our mission—sustainably, ensuring we are accessible affordably to all because those are the only means the Commonwealth has at its disposal of securing a strong economy and a society that provides equal opportunity for all.

Growing momentum in support of that partnership was reflected powerfully in the state’s 2021/22 budget that was recently signed into law by Governor Wolf. In it, the PA State System received an unprecedented one-time $50M investment as an initial down payment on a three-year $200M commitment in support of our System’s Redesign.

I am equally grateful to Governor Wolf for his steadfast leadership and support of our Redesign, and the bipartisan coalition in both chambers of the General Assembly, that turned that support into an investment.

I am grateful for leadership of AFSCME and APSCUF for standing together with us in making our case, and for the opportunity we now have to identify ways the System can operate sustainably while minimizing impacts on our most precious resource—our people.

I am grateful to our Board of Governors, Council of Trustees, and universities presidents for taking on the hard work of convincing our partners in the State that we understand and are taking seriously our part in this relationship, and the countless thousands of employees who have participated actively in designing and impactfully implementing aspects of our redesign. You above all have identified our seriousness of purpose and made demonstrable progress achieving our goals. That work, over and above all else, has been instrumental in building the trust with the General Assembly that our future depends upon.

Together with the one-time funds we will receive courtesy the System’s pre-payment of its SERS obligations and the funding committed by the General Assembly, we have a war chest worth $300 million over four years.

Using those dollars strategically, we can position ourselves not only to survive, but to thrive in the 21st century, to invest the one-time resources necessary to equip our people with the skills and infrastructure and supports that they need to succeed. Like all of higher education, our future will look very different than our past or our present. But God willing, our core mission will remain unchanged—driving social mobility and economic development by advancing opportunity for all Pennsylvanians.

I am an irrepressible optimist by predilection and as such I have always believed that we would find a path to our reinvigoration and the resources necessary to pursue it. Today, I think I can see it emerging out from under a dense thicket.

Timeless Traditions. Changing Times.

Summertime is here, which means another academic year has come and gone and with it a further cohort of students who have completed their degrees—experiencing for themselves the true promise of a public higher education. To those graduates, let me offer my sincere congratulations. You have accomplished something that would be remarkable in the best of times, but something truly extraordinary in these times of pandemic. I can’t tell you how much I admire your tenacity, grit, and determination and how much I honor the faculty and staff, friends and family who stuck with you and supported you along the way. All our graduates inspire me by what they accomplish, but I believe you inspire me most of all. You have learned and demonstrated tremendous resilience—something I hope will serve you well going forward in your lives. Yours is a special class—a special cohort; each and every one of you a special person. Kudos. 

As this year’s graduates take their leave of our System’s 14 life-changing universities, we gird ourselves to continue the transformative work that will ensure we continue to be here for all of Pennsylvanians now and into the future—meeting our students where they are, supporting their needs and the needs of their communities and future employers. The work focuses intensively on integrations, but there is energy behind transformation all across our universities.

It’s been just more than a month since we released plans to integrate two groups of three universities each (Bloomsburg, Lock Haven, and Mansfield in the northeast and California, Clarion, and Edinboro in the west). The plans result from the work of over 1,000 people—students, faculty, staff, and trustees at the aforementioned institutions and an extensive array of consultations with all stakeholder groups, including alumni, civic leaders, donors, and elected representatives. They are: 

• amongst the strongest, most creative, most powerfully student-centered, and most deeply analytical I have seen for higher education, and I consider myself to be a lifelong student and fan of the genre;
• practical—that means implementable;
• grounded deeply in the history and culture of the six universities involved (seeking deliberately, while building something wholly new, to maintain their distinctive strengths, identities, cultures, and community ties); and
• developed inclusively and transparently. 

The plans are presently being strengthened by a public review and comment period that is prescribed in Act 50 (the legislation that gives the Board of Governors the limited authorities it needs to consider integrations). The process is a good one. We’ve already learned a great deal from respondents, and I am grateful to all who have taken time to present comments, especially those that make constructive suggestions about how to achieve the goals we are pursuing through integration and system redesign generally. We are also able to clarify issues that are causing confusion (for example, the fact that the staff reductions resulting from our sustainability planning are completely unrelated to integration, reflect protracted and extensive enrollment declines, and will happen even if the Board does not approve integration plans).

Comments are being cataloged as they are received and fielded to the integrations planning team to determine what actions to take in response.  We are creating a record of what we have heard and how we are responding. We will also be itemizing changes to the plans that result from public comment so that they are instantly recognizable in subsequent drafts of the implementation plans. 

Only part of our system is involved directly in these plans, yet it is important that all become familiar with them. (You can view FAQS here.) Here are three reasons why: 

First, we are Pennsylvania’s public higher education system. As such, we share in a mission that extends beyond the walls of the specific university community into which we quite properly focus our work, hearts, souls, allegiances, and passions. That broader mission is to ensure that all Pennsylvanians, irrespective of their zip code and background, have access to postsecondary education—the last most reliable engine of economic development and social mobility, the most durable and direct bridge to opportunity. But it goes deeper still because most of our universities are fundamental to the health and well-being of the regions in which they are located. They create jobs—in most cases are one of their region’s largest employers. As important, they produce the teachers and health care professionals, and business and community leaders that counties and towns across the state need. This is particularly true for universities in our more rural communities. Those communities tend to grow the talent they need and for that talent they rely upon our universities. Our universities change lives. They also bolster communities. Those two roles go hand in hand and require us to do all that we can to ensure vibrancy at all 14 of our campuses.

Second, as a system, we are a single public corporation. We have a single governance structure, policy environment, and, in effect, a single bank account. Within that structure, the health and well-being of any one of our universities is contingent on the health and well-being of all. Whatever we think about that structure, it imposes upon us the obligation of putting our shoulders to the common wheel, to ensuring that vibrant educational, student and university life continues across our 14 institutions in a manner that is at once affordable for our students and financially sustainable for all. That is the rationale underpinning the integration plans.

Third, in developing integration plans, the faculty, staff, students, and trustees engaged in the process took the opportunity to rethink a university’s functions—from enrollment management to athletics, from student financial aid packaging to health and wellness counselling, from general to graduate education across all learning modalities. How should those functions be performed in order to deliver the best possible and most affordable outcomes for our students? Are there changes we ought to make and if so how can we make them through the integration process? The result is apparent all over the plans and aligns with ambitious goals that get at student access, affordability, and outcomes. In conducting that rethink, planning groups listened to our students through consultation and it is apparent in survey and other data that we have. They also reviewed practices across our system and across higher education nationally, locating those that have demonstrable (evidence-based) positive impact on student outcomes, asking how, whether, and to what extent those practices may be introduced here so that Pennsylvania students may benefit. In this regard, the plans contain a great deal of information that may help inform the innovative work that is happening across our system to improve student affordability, access, and outcomes, and to ensure our campuses become more diverse, equitable and inclusive environments.

In closing, I encourage you to do two things:

First, read the plans. They are long, and you may find parts of them to be a little dull. But it would sadden me and dishonor our 1,000 colleagues should anyone react without engaging the content. Yes, I appreciate that this is a prominent feature of our nation’s popular discourse. It has infected social and news media all along the political spectrum and fueled what may be a uniquely American phenomenon in which facts no longer matter because each is entitled to their own reality (if you have space in your summer reading schedules I encourage you to look at Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland). But ours are institutions of higher learning. Our mission includes defending and advancing the cause and the practice of reason and of science in pursuit of something that is as elusive as it is vital to the well-being of our nation—truth. I look forward to the vigorous debate and discussion that ought now to ensue and hope and pray it will be conducted within these values and with integrity. 

Second, be good to one another. Remember that you are part of a family. As in any family, we members will have different views about different topics. That’s not a bad thing. On the contrary. It’s a good one. Diversity of perspective enriches dialog, breeds deeper understanding of issues and of people, and in an educational setting it models for our students exactly the kinds of skills and abilities we want them to take forward with them into the world after they leave us. But it will only accomplish these higher objectives if family members engage one another with compassion and humility, even in the most heated and consequential of debates; if they allow one another to speak up if they wish, and to feel safe in doing so. How we proceed will demonstrate very publicly—because all eyes in higher education are on Pennsylvania—who we are. It will show to our communities, our students, their families our competitors, our peers, how we are a community devoted to higher learning, able to practice what we teach, and to work within our values. Our interactions with one another will reflect our respect for one another and for safeguarding civil and reasoned discourse—lessons we learned as children, that we teach our children, that we expect of ourselves, our neighbors, and of one another.