A New Name for a New Kind of University System - Part 9

A Time to Fight

Our blog post of October 5, 2015 included the following sentence under the above heading:

 
“Of the two choices in the dilemma facing PASSHE’s Majority Financial Stakeholders, only one choice—to fight to escape the onerous status quo represented by PASSHE’s politically-suffocating embrace—offers any hope for the future of the students at the fourteen PASSHE universities.” (Emphasis added.)
 
Recall that PASSHE’s Majority Financial Stakeholders are the students, parents and private donors— primarily alumni—at the fourteen State-supported institutions of higher education that include Bloomsburg, California, Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown, Lock Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West Chester Universities.
 

The Onerous Status Quo

Merriam-Webster provides two definitions of the term “onerous:”

1: involving, imposing, or constituting a burden: troublesome;

2: having legal obligations that outweigh the advantages.
 
Both of these definitions are pertinent to the case we have been considering, namely the ongoing 100% political control of the fourteen PASSHE universities to the detriment of the universities and the students.
 
Wikipedia describes “status quo” as “a Latin phrase meaning the existing state of affairs, particularly with regards to social or political issues.”
 
The status quo under which the fourteen PASSHE universities have been operating is one that is certainly burdensome and troublesome and imposes legal obligations that outweigh the advantages, at least from the point of view of the fourteen PASSHE universities and their Majority (75%) Financial Stakeholders.
 

PASSHE’s Politically-Suffocating Embrace

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of the word “embrace” is “to hold someone in your arms as a way of expressing love or friendship.”

 
The definition of the word “political” is “of or relating to politics or government.”
 
And the definition of the word “suffocate” is “to die because you are unable to breathe.”
 

PASSHE’s Policy-Induced “Financial Death Spirals”

Lest you think that the term “suffocate” used above is too strong in this case, consider the following facts:

 
The “suffocation” we are talking about here is not physical but financial.  And what is dying here are PASSHE students’ chances of receiving the education described in the “The Pennsylvania Promise” contained in Act 188 of 1982: “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”   Compelling evidence found in official PASSHE data shows that the Pennsylvania Promise has not been delivered to PASSHE students since 2002.
 
Act 188 calls upon the PASSHE universities to provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students. But the universities are increasingly unable to do that—not because of failures on their part—but because of the ongoing failure of the PASSHE Board of Governors to follow the law.
 
For demographic and economic reasons, as previously described, State appropriation funding to the PASSHE universities fell by 65% over the past 65 years, from 90% in 1950 to 25% today.
 
But Act 188 empowers the Board of Governors to make up for declining State funding by adjusting the tuition levels as necessary to provide “high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”  Boards of Governors prior to 2002 have done that. Boards of Governors since 2002 have not done that.
 
For political reasons benefitting elected officials rather than students, the PASSHE BOG has adopted a “low tuition for all” policy that saddles students from less affluent families with crushing student-loan debt, while foolishly providing students from more affluent families with unneeded State subsidies.
 
With only two major sources of funding to the PASSHE universities—State Appropriation and Tuition— the steady decline in the former can only be made up for with an adequate increase in the latter.  The former is the result of demographic and economic forces.  The latter is the result of political expediency.
 
In particular, since 2002 the PASSHE BOG has adopted a policy to maintain the lowest possible tuition, i.e., “sticker price,” at the fourteen PASSHE universities.  This decision may at first sound reasonable, but it contradicts the law (Act 188) which states unambiguously that the purpose of the PASSHE universities is to provide high quality education at the “lowest possible cost to the students,” i.e., the lowest “bottom line.”
 
As any student or parent learns during the college-application process and, as every member of the BOG already knows, there is an enormous difference between “sticker price” and “bottom line,” and that difference consists of the grants or “scholarships” (a.k.a., tuition discounts) that higher education institutions offer to academically qualified students whose families can’t afford to pay the full tuition. 
 
That the PASSHE BOG since 2002 has continued to ignore the plain language of Act 188 is more than disgraceful; it also appears to meet the dictionary definition of “malfeasance in office,” which is, “the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law.”
 
This unfortunate policy decision by the Board of Governors has led directly to financial death spirals at several of the PASSHE universities in 2013 and 2014.  As described in my blog post of July 14, 2014:
 
“In the four month period between August and December of 2013, five of 14 PASSHE universities— Clarion,¹ Edinboro,² Mansfield,³ East Stroudsburg⁴ and Slippery Rock⁵—publicly declared financial distress, ballooning deficits and layoffs of tenured faculty.  On July 4, 2014, Cheyney University⁶ announced the abrupt retirement of its president, with news reports quoting official sources stating that Cheyney’s deficit had more than doubled to $14 million in the last seven years.”
 
A similarity in the media accounts of these six PASSHE universities, especially with regard to ballooning debt, suggest a similarity in the root causes of their financial distress—namely, unfortunate politically-motivated policy decisions by the Board of Governors which both contradict the law and force the PASSHE universities into financial death spirals not of their own making.

To be continued.

¹ http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/08/clarion_university_restructuri.html.  Penn Live, August 16, 2013.
² http://www.post-gazette.com/education/2013/09/11/Edinboro-University-plans-faculty-program-cuts/stories/201309110152. post-gazette.com, September 11, 2013.
³ http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/09/mansfield_university_becomes_t.html. Penn Live, September 26, 2013.

⁴ http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2013/10/30/East-Stroudsburg-is-fourth-state-owned-Pennsylvania-university-to-announce-cuts/stories/201310300139. post-gazette.com, October 30, 2013.
⁵ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6756902/tribune-review-december-24-2013-slippery-rock-university-facing-10-million-deficit-possible-l. Tribune-Review, December 24, 2013.
⁶ http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/265762741.html.