"Privatization Without a Plan" – Part 9

This blog post tells the story of how PASSHE’s failure to plan is contributing to its failure to deliver ‘high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students’ as called for by law in Act 188.

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”  Benjamin Franklin

PASSHE Highlight #7

 
New Book Claims PASSHE’s Failure to Deliver ‘High Quality Education at the Lowest Possible Cost to the Students’ Stems from PASSHE’s Failure to Plan
 
Angelo Armenti, Jr., the former Villanova University Dean and 20-year President of California University (Cal U), recently announced the release of his new book, Privatization Without a Plan: A Failure of Leadership in Pennsylvania Public Higher Education.¹ In it he describes how PASSHE’s 100% political leadership has failed to plan adequately, a failure to plan which contributes greatly to its failure to deliver PASSHE’s statutory purpose: “High quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.”  
 
According to the book, PASSHE’s failure to deliver on Act 188’s promise to the students, parents and alumni donors—who now pay 75% of the operating budgets at the 14 schools—was inevitable for the following reason: PASSHE has not committed itself publicly to any plan for preserving that purpose. Rather, according to Armenti, PASSHE leaders have avoided even mentioning that purpose both on the website and in public statements by PASSHE’s elected and appointed State officials.

“After failing to commit publicly to PASSHE’s statutory purpose, is anyone surprised at PASSHE's failure to achieve it,” Armenti asked?

According to Amenti, compelling evidence for PASSHE’s failure to plan may be seen in the following facts which are documented on the PASSHE Board of Governors’ website and in his book Privatization Without a Plan: 1) PASSHE has been operating without a strategic plan² since its last one officially expired in 2009; 2) PASSHE has not produced a Factbookᶟ on which planning efforts might be based since 2011; and 3) PASSHE leaders have not acted to preserve and deliver PASSHE’s statutory purpose even as enrollments grew by 58% and State funding/FTE student fell⁴ by 50%.

In October 2010 the Board of Governors approved an 8-paragraph document entitled “PASSHE Strategic Initiatives.” From Paragraph 1: “PASSHE’s most recent strategic plan, Leading the Way, expired in 2009.”

“Note,” Armenti said, “that four years have passed since PASSHE’s previous strategic plan expired and yet, PASSHE continues to operate a $1.5 billion enterprise without benefit of a strategic plan to reaffirm its fundamental purpose and to lay out the major goals, objectives, activities and success measures needed to guide eleven-thousand employees in serving well PASSHE’s 112,000 students.”

Armenti notes that “This three-year old document makes no mention of Act 188 or PASSHE’s purpose by law: ‘Its purpose shall be to provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students.’ According to Merriam-Webster the word ‘shall,’ when used in laws, means a directive ‘to express what is mandatory.’ Regrettably, the Board of Governors did not include, and appears to be ignoring, this legal mandate from Act 188 in its PASSHE Strategic Initiatives document.”

Armenti also notes that “While the document does include a passing reference to ‘quality’ academic programs, it totally ignores the Act 188 promise of high quality education ‘at the lowest possible cost to the students.’ Avoiding any public mention of that half of PASSHE’s statutory purpose suggests that the Board of Governors is not even planning to try to achieve it which, if true, would be an abdication of responsibility with staggering negative consequences for 112,000 current and future PASSHE students.”

According to its website, PASSHE has not produced a Factbook since FY 2011. “And,” according to Armenti, “all serious strategic plans involve goals specified in the following terms: ‘From x to y in time t;’ meaning that one needs to know where one is with regard to each strategic variable in order to plan for and achieve the desired improvement within a certain time frame. PASSHE’s failure to produce annual Factbooks since 2011 means that the Act 188 statutory purpose of the PASSHE universities is not likely to be achieved under PASSHE’s current leadership, due to what appears to be an embarrassingly cavalier attitude with regard to the need for planning.”

Privatization Without a Plan, according to the book, documents a 58% increase in student enrollment (from 71,091 to 112,180 students) combined with a 50% decrease in State appropriation per student (from $7,386 to $3,679 in constant dollars). These conflicting 30-year trends illustrate the dilemma faced by the PASSHE universities (more and more students to educate and fewer and fewer State dollars with which to educate them), and the PASSHE students (higher and higher levels of student loan debt as State funding continues to erode).

“As more and more students seek the promise of public higher education in Pennsylvania—high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students—the State is seen shifting more and more of the cost of education to the students and parents themselves, negating the very concept of ‘public’ in the term ‘public higher education,’” Armenti said.

¹ Privatization Without a Plan: A Failure of Leadership in Pennsylvania Public Higher Education is on sale now, available from Amazon.com in paperback and e-book. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=angelo%20armenti
² https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6726962/passhe-strategic-initiatives-october-13-2010-35k
ᶟ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6726961/passhe-factbook-for-fy-2010-11-2-5-meg
⁴ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6726973/privatization-without-a-plan-chart-8-december-3-2013-382k

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Angelo Armenti Jr. served as President of California University of Pennsylvania (Cal U) from 1992 to 2012. Before that, he was a Dean at Villanova University, a professor of physics, and author of The Physics of Sports (American Institute of Physics, 1992). During his career at Cal U, Armenti is credited with establishing numerous funding sources for student scholarships and for campus revitalization projects, efforts made in part to address the problems that he describes in Privatization Without a Plan. In June of 2012, Armenti founded a non-profit corporation entitled The Pennsylvania Association of State Colleges and Universities (PASCU) whose mission it is to preserve the purpose of public higher education in Pennsylvania.