It was thought that Act 188 would provide a sufficient buffer between the 14 universities and direct political control to allow the PASSHE universities and PASSHE students to thrive. In fairness, the law worked perfectly well for its first 19 years (1984-2002), but it has increasingly failed to work since 2002.¹
What Went Wrong?
In a word: The clear mandate of Act 188—The Pennsylvania Promise of “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students”—has been ignored by the PASSHE Board of Governors since 2002.
Act 188² created a two-step process for the annual funding of the 14 PASSHE universities and from the very beginning, that process was predicated on the presence of two very different sources of funding: 1) State appropriation revenue, provided by the taxpayers; and 2) Tuition + Fees + Other revenue, provided by the PASSHE students, parents and private donors, primarily PASSHE alumni.
Historically speaking—in terms of these two PASSHE budget sources—the State provided 90% in 1950, 63% in 1984, and 25% in 2013, while the budget share provided by students, parents and alumni rose from 10% to 37% to 75%! This huge shift in the costs of “public” higher education from the State to the students, parents and alumni donors has been called “privatization without a plan.”¹ Official data show this cost shifting has been happening relentlessly in Pennsylvania and in many other states for decades.
Under Act 188’s statutory funding process, Pennsylvania’s elected officials get to decide how much appropriation the State can afford to provide to PASSHE in any given year, and then the Board of Governors gets to decide what the PASSHE tuition rates must be in order to achieve PASSHE’s statutory purpose: “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”
Since Act 188 doesn’t authorize any role for the Pennsylvania governor in the tuition-setting process, the authors of Act 188 apparently never anticipated that elected officials would insert themselves into that process, with the unfortunate result that the statutory purpose of the 14 PASSHE universities since 2002 has been sacrificed to the political expediency of politicians from both parties.
“The promise given was a necessity of
the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”
Niccolò Machiavelli, The PrinceAnd as shown in another attached chart,⁴ the Board of Governors is not providing a PASSHE university education at anything like the lowest possible cost to the students.
In effect, the Pennsylvania Promise: High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students, which was made to PASSHE students with passage of Act 188, became a broken promise in the years between 2002 and the present.
Since the underlying law was not
changed during that time, the sudden change in results can only be explained by
a change in the politics of
the situation, a self-serving change that would have come as no surprise to Machiavelli,
as the following quote makes clear:
“One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit...Love is a bond of obligation that these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes.” (Niccolò Machiavelli)
Considering PASSHE’s failure to deliver the
Pennsylvania Promise of High quality education at the lowest possible cost to
the students, and considering Machiavelli’s two quotes above, one conclusion becomes
inescapable: Machiavelli’s hypothesis about
broken promises by politicians fits PASSHE’s fact pattern.
The PASSHE Fact Pattern and
the Emergence of PASCU
Since 2002, elected officials from both parties,
Democratic and Republican, have controlled not just the level of State
Appropriation to PASSHE—which is their right and duty—they have also controlled
the tuition-setting process in PASSHE—a right and duty which Act 188 reserves
to the Board of Governors.
By caving in to political pressure from two Governors
to keep tuition rates (sticker price) low—when Act 188 requires not the
lowest possible tuition but, rather, the lowest possible cost to the students
(bottom line)—politically subservient Boards of Governors since 2002 have allowed
the Pennsylvania Promise: High quality education at the lowest possible cost to
the students, to become just an empty promise.
But Machiavelli also offers hope for change in the
last phrase of the above quote by identifying what all self-serving politicians
apparently fear the most: “…a dread of punishment that never passes.”
The individuals harmed the most by the lawless way
in which the mandate of Act 188 has been ignored are the Majority Financial
Stakeholders—the PASSSHE students, parents and alumni donors—who now provide
75% of PASSHE’s annual operating revenue, while the State provides just 25%.
But until now, elected officials from both parties
had no reason to fear punishment at the polls from the hundreds of thousands of
PASSHE students, parents and alumni negatively affected by the brazen failure of
these officials to deliver the Pennsylvania Promise, as mandated by law in Act
188. And that is because those Majority Stakeholders have not yet found their
voice. But that is about to change.
The Pennsylvania
Association of State Colleges & Universities (PASCU)⁵ was created to awaken
PASSHE’s Majority Stakeholders—a huge sleeping giant—whose interests have been ignored
by Pennsylvania’s elected and appointed officials for years in favor of advancing
their own self-serving interests instead.
On behalf of PASSHE’s Majority Stakeholders, PASCU
hopes to instill in Pennsylvania’s elected and appointed officials the fear that
Machiavelli calls “the dread of punishment that never passes.”
Were Machiavelli alive today, he might comment on the
broken Pennsylvania Promise as follows:
“What self-serving elected
officials fear most is electoral defeat and exclusion from the public trough.”
¹ http://www.amazon.com/Privatization-Without-Plan-Leadership-Pennsylvania/dp/1491295244/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408368767&sr=8-1&keywords=angelo+armenti. ² http://www.passhe.edu/inside/bog/Pages/Act-188.aspx.
³ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6794551/privatization-without-a-plan-chart-9-and-caption-january-23-2014-pdf-387k.
⁴ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6802256/privatization-without-a-plan-chart-20-and-caption-january-29-2014-pdf-390k.
⁵ http://www.pascu.net/.
No comments:
Post a Comment