When Daniel Greenstein took over as chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education in 2018, it was bleeding students and money, and he was an unknown quantity as a system leader. Last month he announced he would step down in October, having led for six tumultuous years that included merging six of the system’s 14 four-year public universities in an attempt to save all of them from fiscal insolvency. Whether he ultimately “saved” the system still remains to be seen, but Greenstein has shown he can marshal the forces of a large public-university system for change.
Greenstein, the former director of postsecondary success for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began his tenure at the system, known as PASSHE, with the usual listening tour of campuses and constituencies. But he also proved more forthcoming than many past chancellors, sources say. He shared data and other information more openly and cultivated less adversarial relationships with the system’s labor organizations. The good will he bought helped when he announced a controversial plan to combine six of the system’s most troubled campuses into two new institutions, Pennsylvania Western University and Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. That initiative has consumed most of the rest of his stint in office.
First-time enrollment rose by 3.4 percent across the system in the fall of 2023, but overall enrollment fell by 2.2 percent and is still down 31 percent from its 2011 peak of 120,000 students. Commonwealth’s second fall class in 2023 saw a more than 10-percent increase in enrollment over its first, but Penn West’s fall-2023 enrollment was down nearly 12 percent from the previous year. Enrollment figures for the fall of 2024 are not yet available.
Greenstein is leaving PASSHE for a position he says he will announce next month. He’s interested to see if the work he’s done has taken root. Back in his Gates days, he says, the foundation often invested in people who had a particular idea or drive more than in the organizations they worked for. But “at the end of the day, you always want to know what happens after the leader leaves,” he says, “because that’s inevitable.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the hardest thing about your job over the last six years?
At the Gates Foundation, you got this national purview. You could see all the cool stuff going on, and my head filled with all that opportunity. But unless your organization is prepared to take that stuff on, it doesn’t happen, except in these boutique cabinets-of-curiosity type projects. And you have to spend way more time than I thought just putting in place basic organizational operating capability — governance, accountability, data, a culture that rewards data-driven decision-making, all that stuff. It’s like drains and toilets. You have to mend the drains and toilets to enable you to do all the other stuff.
In my first meeting, I said, we’re going to put in place a bunch of enterprise-management tools that simply aren’t here. It was basic rules of the road for governance and how we work together — presidents, the chancellor’s office, and the board. What does individual institutional accountability look like to the chancellor, for the chancellor to the presidents, all that stuff. Doing budgeting in similar ways, so that we actually had a comparable way to understand our circumstances. Everybody’s using the same methods of governance, using the same kind of data methodology, putting their budgets together in the same way, before we really understood what our financial picture was like. And it was pretty bleak, bleaker than anybody would have understood before. That took a year, and not because people are bad, it’s just because we had to agree what the approach was going to be, and then do it.
And it’s funny, because I think one of our signal achievements is that we work together as leaders across the universities with the system office. We identify practices that help us improve our students’ outcomes and improve our financial circumstances at the university level, and we build them up as playbooks, and then we hold each other accountable for implementing them. We learned how to do that along the way. If I had seen that in 2018, I would have started then, and we would have been so much further forward. But that just took time to build the trust and the muscle to work together to find these sort of minimum-level threshold standards that everybody really should be adopting, because they’re good for students.
We’ve done enough of that where I feel like, ‘Gosh, some of this muscle is now ingrained in the fabric.’ We’ll find out.
What were the biggest hurdles behind the scenes of the institutional consolidations? Maybe a constituency that gave you unexpected angry calls, or nitpicky things that you wouldn’t have expected to be a big problem that were?
I didn’t think anybody acted out of form. On the flip side, and I’ve said this publicly, it was not super fun. It was hard. And you’re dealing with very different competing interests which are often being vigorously expressed and trying to navigate a path.
I tend to focus on the upside, which was that, generally, different constituents understood that a) there was a problem, and b) public higher education is super important. The contest was not about the why or the what, it was how. It was all about the how. How best to put [PASSHE] on a trajectory that is best for students and best for the state. So even in those most difficult moments when you’re getting eviscerated by whoever on whatever topic it was, it wasn’t from a place of malice, it was from a place of care. It didn’t always feel like that, but it was true.
This plays into my next question a bit. You’ve worked under two governors — Tom Wolf and Josh Shapiro, both Democrats — who’ve been pretty pro-higher education and willing to stick their necks out at least a bit and back you up with money and support. Would this consolidation have worked if you had been dealing with more adversarial administrations?
I talk about success drivers. I think the administration is definitely one. This is really hard work. I can’t imagine doing it without wells of political support. I was fortunate in my circumstances, because we had support in the governor’s offices. We’ve had support from Democrats, we’ve had strong support from Republicans in the chambers that they had a majority, and we were able to build that coalition to the center. So I can imagine scenarios where you don’t have that trifecta, but you’re still able to pull it forward. But I don’t see how you do this without significant political backing.
Actually, opposition would be painful, but so would benign neglect, right? I don’t see how you succeed in either of those circumstances, where either the legislature is distracted by other issues or doesn’t care, or is dead set against you.
Is there a timeline in which these consolidations didn’t happen and the system is still going along and not in some dire straits?
I was on a panel at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association conference last week with the president of Fontbonne University. She was the president who announced its closure in March, bless her, and she did it when there was actually money in the bank to do it gracefully and well, for students and employees, so good for her. And we had this interesting discussion of how privates and publics are different. There’s no Chapter 11 in the public sector. And most public universities would require some sort of legislative or political action to engineer a college closure. So the incentive structure is very different in the public world. Because the existential threat doesn’t appear in the same way. Things can get really, really, really, really dire, and thank God we’re not there, but what happens when they do? Full faith and credit of the state is on the hook, isn’t it? So, in a public-sector organization, there can be people who think, ‘We just run it into the ground and someone’s got to pick it up.’
One of our biggest challenges we had to overcome is to build a different kind of sense of urgency. And we’ve done that a couple of ways. One of them is to say, ‘Look, we’re all in this together.’ And that builds a kind of horizontal accountability between universities. Everybody realizes, ‘Okay, we’ve all got to get right, or we’re all going to maybe feel it.’
The other thing that’s been helpful is not to be punitive. The objective is, where a university is struggling, to throw support at it. When Penn West really struggled in its first year of operation, people lined up from across the system — we harvested really talented folks, many of them from West Chester University, and then planted them at Penn West to go help. That’s a really powerful thing, and not the same kind of urgency that you find in a private-sector organization, where when it runs out of money, it runs out of money.
Switching gears a little, the consolidation in part seems to have been predicated on the idea of closing a talent gap for the state between the number of jobs requiring credentials and the number of adults who have one. I’ve written about adult students, and it’s almost a completely different type of education, and a lot of it is conducted online. It seems like the consolidations are not prioritizing online education so much, so I’m just curious about how adult students are fitting into this when it doesn’t seem like the system is making a big push for doing things differently for them.
So Penn West, its online program ... they actually think of themselves as having four programs — each of the three [physical] campuses, and then the online [arm] is its largest enrollment. And Commonwealth is really emphasizing adult-professional education, and they’ve done some really interesting work, and the hope is that it’ll trickle down. So both those things are happening at those places and actually across the system.
We think that our greatest enrollment-growth strategy — actually, I think of it in terms of credentialing productivity, because that gets at the workforce part — in the short term is to do better by the students we have. So I’m pretty proud of the increases we’re seeing in things like retention, graduation rates, etc. You look at Slippery Rock University, for example — just killing it. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has really made some significant progress. West Chester. So there are lots of places which are really nailing it in some of those areas.
But you’re exactly right that adult education is a different product, if what we’re doing is a product. Certainly a different service, right? It’s a different market. Advising, enrolling, recruiting, financial-aid services, etc., are just completely different. And we have some of those pockets. There’s a culinary school at Indiana. There’s what we call Act 120 schools. They train municipal-safety officers at Indiana, Commonwealth, and Mansfield University. We have a bunch of those things going on — adult-focused, nondegree.
I think where we’re seeing a real opportunity is to integrate nondegree credentialing into degree-seeking programs for degree-seeking students. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, come here, spend $100,000, you get a degree, 63 percent of you graduate, and you’ll do well, here’s the data,’ now we’re saying, ‘Actually you can be certified along the way with industry-recognized certifications.’ And so we’re integrating more and more of this and improving the return on investment for your traditional student.
Do you have any hopes that at any time in the foreseeable future there will be political will to develop state-level governance to better oversee PASSHE, the state-related universities, and the community colleges so that they will cooperate in a more coordinated fashion and compete against each other less?
When I get asked, my advice is start with things that are achievable and doable — and there’s a bunch of them out there — and work together to achieve those objectives and build that trust, and you can go places. And I’m seeing it around conversations around data, around transfer articulation. I wouldn’t start with the hardest thing and just go there. But if the State Board of Higher Education is well-managed and grabs onto things that it can execute and really build some trust, I think there’s a real opportunity.
Last question: Rate your job performance.
I think other people are going to do that, probably a lot.
In some ways, I think I got lucky. Covid sucks. I never want to go through a global pandemic again, and God willing, I won’t. But because we were thrown ahead of the curve [in 2019] with all this integration and financial rightsizing and all the stuff you’re seeing people do now, and when all that huge injection of one-time funding came from the federal Covid-relief dollars, we were able to invest it in that redesign. Not all of it, but a lot of places that we’re investing it in just backstopping [regular] operations. Now that money’s gone, they’re struggling hard. So we were able to put that money to good work, and I think that really accelerated what we could accomplish.
And I think the other thing is, when I got here for my job interview, everybody knew there was a problem. Nobody knew how deep it was or the dimensions, and nobody necessarily aligned around what the solutions were. But I never spent any time convincing people we’ve got to do something different. That was as a gift. I mean, different views, we’ll fight with each other, whatever, but, yeah, there’s a problem. We’re going to figure out how to fix it.
