State System of Higher Education interim Chancellor Karen Whitney intends to pull no punches when she goes before state lawmakers to ask for the $73 million increase in funding – for a total of $526.2 million – that it has requested from the state for the 14 universities she oversees.
She intends to tell them that the $15 million increase in funding, for a total of $468.1 million, that Gov. Tom Wolf proposed in his budget for the State System is appreciated, but not enough to meet the needs of its 102,000 students.
Much of the additional money that the system seeks is to pay for contractually obligated salary increases prescribed by labor contracts negotiated by the Wolf Administration for which the system had no control.
“If the state in its various forms commits us to these labor costs, they should fund them,” Whitney said.
That is the perspective she intends to share with lawmakers on the House and Senate appropriations committees Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
Whitney responded to questions about a variety of issues the State System is confronting as it undergoes a major overhaul from top to bottom. A summary of her responses follow.
RISING TUITION: If the state doesn’t pay the mandated cost increases that the system is facing, Whitney said it falls on the students, which is the only other major revenue source for these public universities that have an intensive teaching and learning mission.
This year, in-state undergraduate students who attend Bloomsburg, California, Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown, Lock Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West Chester universities pay a base tuition rate of $7,492.
The system board has been willing to ask students to pay more each year to balance its budget but it generally limits those increase to less than 3 percent. That historically has meant that university presidents are tasked with finding cuts in their budgets to cover the shortfall.
But Whitney said that has happened so often “we’re at a point now that if there were any elimination of expenses, we stop doing things.”
“It’s too early to talk about what those “things” might be or how much tuition will have to increase”, she said. “We’re still working the ledger side with the state.”
ACADEMIC MARKETPLACE: The system is undergoing a comprehensive review of all of its policies, processes and procedures while keeping three goals in mind: ensuring student success, leveraging university strengths, and transforming the governance/leadership structure.
Out of that is a vision of creating an academic marketplace where a student enrolled at one university could earn a certificate, take a course, complete a major or minor offered by another university within the system.
“So let’s say you have a student at Slippery Rock who is getting degree in health care and they particularly would like to take a course that is very Afro-centric or really speaks to the condition of African Americans,” she said. “They could stay at Slippery Rock University and acquire these other experiences across a united system. We’re working on that right now.”
How soon would this academic marketplace be available?
“I have no idea. This is innovative. This is leading edge in American higher education what we’re working through here. It’s a ton of work to do what I just envisioned but that’s our mission,” Whitney said. “I believe we will get there and we’re trying to do it as quickly as we can.”
BUILDING ENROLLMENT: Enrollment in the system has fallen since 2010 when it topped nearly 120,000 students. Part of that has to do with a decline in the number of high school graduates. Meanwhile, Whitney said there is another enrollment opportunity deserving of the system’s attention – the 1.2 million Pennsylvanians with some college and no degree.
“We have a ton of people who are not really meeting their greatest potential in our capitalist democracy because of that,” she said. “So while we have a temporary shift right now in high school graduates, the larger number of citizens are still remarkably undereducated and therefore, I believe are underemployed and not fully being appreciated in their workplace and in their communities.”
