In Pennsylvania, the Strike Is Over, but the Challenges Remain

Professors returned to class last week after a three-day strike over a contract dispute with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Life is returning to normal on the state’s 14 regional campuses, but normal is far from ideal.

Faculty members are getting back to work at institutions within a system faced with limited state funding and faltering enrollment, neither of which are expected to recover fully in the near term. It’s widely recognized that the system needs to rethink and retool itself, but there is little momentum for change, and no statewide structure to guide it. The recent dispute over pay, benefits, and working rules for faculty at PASSHE, as the system is known, may be just a skirmish in a larger struggle over how these regional universities — and others like them across the country — will survive.

Like almost all states, Pennsylvania has cut funding for higher education, or kept it level, from year to year for most of the past decade. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has increased state spending on PASSHE by almost $32 million over the past two years, but that claws back only one-third of the $90-million cut the system received in 2010 alone. The limited public funding has helped drive up tuition and student debt. Pennsylvania ranked 49th among states in college affordability, according to a study this year by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

PASSHE’s demographic challenges resemble those of other state systems in the Northeast and Midwest. The Pennsylvania regional campuses draw students mostly from within the commonwealth, and that pipeline is narrowing. About 90 percent of the system’s students come from Pennsylvania, and about 85 percent are between the ages of 18 and 25. At the same time, the number of high-school graduates in the commonwealth is expected to grow by only 1 percent between 2020 and 2028. In some of the more rural counties, which many PASSHE campuses serve, the number of high-school graduates is projected to decline by as much as 33 percent through 2023.

In recent years, the system has recognized that the pattern is untenable. Rather than rely on drawing traditional-age students who want the residential experience, system officials have sought to do more to draw older students who may want to finish a degree. The system has expanded its online offerings to 59 degree programs and 53 certificates in part to better serve working adults. Nevertheless, fall enrollment of students over 25 has remained effectively flat systemwide since 2012.

Meanwhile, the PASSHE institutions must compete with other state colleges, including Penn State University and its 19 branch campuses, for public dollars and for students. And there is no statewide governing board for higher education to create a statewide strategy across all institutions. PASSHE has in the past year begun its own review to take “a very hard look at the system, how it’s organized, how it’s serving the students and the commonwealth, and what it should look like in the future,” says Kenn Marshall, a system spokesman. But progress on the discussions was slowed by recent negotiations with the faculty union, Mr. Marshall adds, and there is no current timetable for the review to proceed.

The system’s troubles are frustrating, “because it’s not as if this is a surprise,” says Joni E. Finney, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and director of its Institute for Research on Higher Education. “We knew the young population was in decline for a long time in Pennsylvania. We knew the state budget was getting tighter, especially after the recession.”

“It is a huge mess here.”

‘Nothing Off the Table’

PASSHE is critical to improving Pennsylvania’s educational attainment and shoring up its economic future, according to a report issued this year by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. By 2020, more than 60 percent of the jobs in Pennsylvania will require a bachelor’s degree, the report states. Only about 35 percent of working-age Pennsylvanians were college graduates in 2014.

Regional publics, like those in PASSHE, tend to be the workhorses in state higher-education systems, offering the least-expensive access to four-year degrees and enrolling large numbers of minority and low-income students. PASSHE institutions enroll nearly 89,000 undergraduates and award one in five bachelor’s degrees in the state. It costs a little more than $14,000 a year on average to attend a PASSHE university, compared with more than $18,000 for other four-year public institutions and more than $26,000 for private nonprofit institutions in the commonwealth, according to the Georgetown report. Pell Grant recipients make up 32 percent of PASSHE’s student body, compared with 28 percent for other public four-year institutions in the commonwealth.

But Pennsylvania, and the PASSHE system, face limits on what they can do to put state universities on a better footing. One of the biggest challenges lies in the lack of momentum to change the status quo. A decade’s worth of cuts and declining enrollment “are going to require a new strategic direction, and this is going to require leadership,” says Thomas L. Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “And there are sticky issues of place, programs, needs, and funding that need to be resolved among all the stakeholders.”

Pennsylvania faces sticky statewide political issues, too. The relationship between the Democratic governor and the predominantly Republican legislature “has been marked by political discord and polarization similar in many respects to Illinois,” says Mr. Harnisch. Like Illinois, Pennsylvania went without a state budget for many months this year, and Mr. Wolf’s push for increased education funding was one of the primary points of disagreement that led to the stalemate.

Mr. Wolf convened a meeting with higher-education officials in September to discuss how to improve the commonwealth’s college options. “It is a conversation the governor is committed to continuing,” says Jeff Sheridan, a spokesman, though additional meetings are not scheduled at this time.

Other states in the Northeast are starting to make changes to their public-college systems to deal with shrinking budgets and populations, and to respond to new education and work-force needs. The University of Maine, for example, has begun consolidating some administrative operations and academic programs to save money and has created several tuition programs to draw students from out of state. Last month Vermont merged the operations of Johnson State College and Lyndon State College. States like Maine, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, Mr. Harnisch says, have “to be very creative about ways to generate new revenue, and to attract students to their campuses.”

PASSHE institutions, too, have sought to change. To better match work-force needs and student demand, the system has added nearly 300 academic programs, including an engineering program — a first for the system — at Shippensburg University and three doctoral programs in nursing. As part of continuing program reviews, the system has also cut or placed under moratorium more than 400 programs with low demand.

The system’s strategic review process is meant to “ask the tough questions and see where they lead,” says Mr. Marshall, the system spokesman. Frank T. Brogan, the chancellor, told a spring budget meeting that “nothing can be off the table,” Mr. Marshall says.

A System Squeezed

The biggest challenge facing the Pennsylvania state system is money. It will take millions of dollars to create new programs to meet the state’s educational and work-force needs, and that’s on top of the millions of dollars the system would need to get back to prerecession levels of state support. Despite Mr. Wolf’s best intentions, additional money will be difficult to come by, given the state’s financial picture and polarized politics.

PASSHE, like other state systems, may have to keep looking for ways to trim expenses, even after years of austerity. The system already has about 1,000 fewer employees than it did a decade ago, according to Mr. Marshall. Adjusting to harsh revenue realities tends to come down to a focus on the numbers of faculty, says Dennis P. Jones, president emeritus of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, “because that is where the remaining money is.”

The details of the contract agreement between the system and the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties have not been made public, but the pending contract will include raises for faculty members and concessions to the system on health-care costs, according to Kenneth M. Mash, president of the union. The union successfully fought back proposed contract changes that would have allowed universities to transfer faculty from department to department, or to increase the use of adjunct instructors and new graduate students as teachers, Mr. Mash says.

He rejects the idea that the strike and the new contract contribute to the system’s challenges. Mr. Mash says he understands that the system is in the grips of a financial squeeze, but “that’s the same, typical argument that’s made in the private sector when management isn’t making wise decisions and we’re asked to blame labor for it.” The union lobbies the legislature for increased support, but ultimately, he says, it’s the job of the system administrators, and the university presidents, to make the case for increased funding of the system. “You can only retract so much, as far as what you do at the university,” Mr. Mash says. “That’s not a formula that will continue to work.”

Without increased support and better strategic planning, state systems like PASSHE may have little choice, Mr. Jones says. “Cut where you can and hope it works.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.