On my personal blog, a wrote a piece about my thoughts regarding Frank Brogan's new appointment as the chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). A little over a week after the appointment he spoke freely and easily about retrenchment and making cuts to programs and staff. As the post on my site reveals, I am not a fan of this approach. However he is not a lone voice in the crowd and he really did not create the problem. I saw the storm coming on the horizon two years ago when I worked for PASSHE (and then proceeded to get the hell out of Dodge).
That storm involves the drastic cuts to spending and other allocations to higher education. It is especially bad in Pennsylvania due to how public higher education is structured here. The situation here is that the large "public", research level institutions (the ones that are known all over the country and offer a full offering of courses and majors, including medical and law programs, as well as doctoral programs) such as Penn State, University of Pittsburgh and Temple are actually not public at all. Rather they are "state supported". For in-state students, this designation really hits them in terms of tuition. A Pennsylvania resident will pay $16,090/yr just in tuition to attend Penn State (even more for select programs...such as nursing or engineering). The PASSHE schools on the other hand are true public universities. The annual tuition at Clarion University, where Mr. Brogan made his comments, is $9,454/yr for in-state residents.
And yet it is these schools (the PASSHE schools), and their students and staff which have to take the brunt of force being laid out from the state's efforts to control costs!
It is no secret that across the country, we have reached a sort of crisis situation in regards to higher education. College tuition has risen well beyond the rate of regular inflation and millions of Americans are drowning in student loan debt (myself included). Yet more and more Americans are earning bachelor degrees. But in my own humble opinion, it is not because they love learning; and it does not mean that Americans on a whole are more educated. In regards to the former, people feel that in today's cut-throat job market, you need a bachelor's degree to even get your foot in the door. In regards to the latter, there is no shortage of for-profit and fly-by-night type of operations that will grant a degree to anyone as long as you can pay. And pay you most definitely will!
In spite of this current reality, higher education has been an easy target area for state governors and their cronies to "control" state budgets. I guess in the end, why should they fund public universities from state coffers when the students can just take out more loan money to pay higher tuition rates, which will accomplish the same thing? That's right...even though we want an educated populace, let's move the bulk of the burden of the cost of this education to go on them. So what if the final bill of their four year education is ten times the annual household income of their family? So what if we push STEM and other subjects on them that they may not have any aptitude or interest in? So what if a full 1/3 of the college student population fails to even earn a degree in six years?
We have wars to pay for.
We have inefficient taxation policies that we can't be bothered to fix.
We have non-competitively priced contracts that we can't break.
We have exorbitant salaries to pay to our government officials.
Public higher education in the United States is akin to playing croquet with the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland; it is twisted, dysfunctional and the deck is most definitely stacked against many players in the game. A generation ago, if you were poor, but you were a good student, going to your local public university was a true opportunity to mobilize from one social class to the next. Today it is a prohibitively expensive rite of passage that poor students, even academically strong ones, pay a hefty price of admission to even participate in. And even when they pass through, there is no promise of a good paying job on the other side.
People wonder why Americans are getting left behind academically in comparison to places like China and India. Well think about it...those countries both truly respect and support scholarship. I personally know of several people from the aforementioned countries, and if you studied hard, could hold up to the stiff academic competition, and generally excelled...then you and your family had little to worry about in terms of financing your higher education. Here is the U.S., we just pay lip service to the idea of supporting higher education because there are no federal programs that distribute money for college based on academics. And when I say "money"...I do not mean loans. That's another problem; we have been conditioned to hearing that student loans are a form of financial aid. The reality is that they are not. It is debt...pure and simple. A debt that is not easily discharged or forgiven. As Americans, that is what we face; even when looking to attend our public universities...whose costs have grown beyond the reach of what most middle-income families can afford to pay out of pocket.
So shame on you America. You hold the hot dog out on a stick when we are starving and we are nearly killed in our efforts to get to it. But you don't see any problems with that at all; hey, at least you put it out there!