Campuses urged to share their resources
State System leader calls for cooperation
Every student attending a State System of Higher Education school should have access to courses on that campus and to the full array of offerings delivered remotely by the 14-member universities, the system’s new chancellor said Wednesday.
Daniel Greenstein, speaking as he was formally installed in Harrisburg, laid out his vision for the struggling State System. It involves member campuses working with each other, with two-year colleges and with K-12 districts to create new pathways to credentials for those advancing in careers, rebounding from a job loss, or — as older adult learners — finishing off degrees.
The system, which serves 98,000 students, is two years into a redesign effort to address sharp enrollment losses and budgetary woes that include lagging state support. In his first State-of-the-System address, and in a phone interview before it, Mr. Greenstein suggested that schools must put aside rivalries built up in the scramble for dwindling numbers of high school graduates.
“In a transformed system, our universities stop competing with each other on every dimension,” he said. “Instead, they organize to leverage their enormous collective operating scale.”
It begins with a recruiting message that choosing any of the schools, in effect, brings with it the best instruction delivered online by West Chester, Kutztown and East Stroudsburg universities in the east, and Slippery Rock, Edinboro and Indiana in the west, among others.
What Mr. Greenstein called “the sharing system” would shore up the schools’ collective bottom line by putting those in the classroom first.
“To future students thinking about where to pursue their degree, hear me on this: In a transformed system, we organize around you and your success,
rather than asking you to organize around us,’’ he said.
Mr. Greenstein took office Sept. 4 as the system’s fifth chancellor. He inherited a redesign process that has touched everything from price policy and governance to the speed with which new degree programs are approved and the merits of campus autonomy versus system control.
The ongoing redesign effort was discussed and endorsed Wednesday during the start of a two-day meeting of the system’s board of governors. The new chancellor has cast the system’s struggles as part of a broader effort to redefine higher education and said its schools can be a national leader in that struggle.
Mr. Greenstein has said is he open to eliminating a single systemwide tuition in favor of campus pricing based on regional markets. Several campuses already have traded full-time tuition rates for per-credit undergraduate pricing, but the approach has been controversial, and it has increased prices on some campuses.
Mr. Greenstein said that in return for local control, individual campuses should be more obligated to demonstrate that their decisions deliver results. With his concurrence, the system’s board of governors in October delayed a decision on eliminating the single tuition price until the campuses reached agreed-upon goals for academic and financial success.
Schools must “doubledown on student retention, knowing that our best opportunities for enrollment growth in the near term come from within,” Mr. Greenstein said in his remarks, prepared for delivery.
They also must do better by traditionally underrepresented students priced out of other higher education options — a group for whom the State System is the best and perhaps last hope, he said.
And the campuses must tap more deeply into the older adult market.
In turn, Mr. Greenstein said, the chancellor’s office must focus less on compliance and administrative functions and more on strategy and keeping the member schools connected with each other and in touch with workforce needs.
State System students already can take courses online from other universities, but the process can be cumbersome and opportunities are not well-promoted, officials said.
In his address, Mr. Greenstein echoed the urging of state legislators that the system work more closely with the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln universities, and with private colleges. However, he said he has not yet had discussions about that with those schools.
Across the U.S., regional public universities have struggled with declines in high school graduates the past decade or so, and have seen campus budgets strained as state aid to those campus has waned.
In Pennsylvania, where state subsidies to higher education are third from last, Mr. Greenstein said this state’s universities are a stark example of a longstanding national trend, which has fueled tuition increases.