Dean Dad at Insider Higher Ed has a very interesting post about Pennsylvania's proposal for vouchers for college tuition.
Apparently, Pennsylvania is considering moving to a voucher system for public higher education. The idea is to zero out the direct funding for colleges and universities, and to replace it with money to students. Colleges’ funding will become a direct function of enrollment.
There’s a superficial appeal to the idea. Colleges would have to direct funding more intensively towards the kinds of things that result in higher enrollments or they would suffer cuts. At some level, the locus of power would shift to students, since he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Read the whole thing.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t understand the details on this.
From the Public Source article: As early as last spring, Corbett said he would favor severing direct appropriations for state-related universities such as the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University and Penn State University, according to a higher-education official who was briefed on Corbett’s thinking and asked not to be named.
Those three schools are three of the four state-related universities. The other is historically black Lincoln University and I don’t know why it wasn’t listed. These schools get state dollars to provide cheaper undergraduate tuition for PA residents. I don’t know anything about Temple, so I’ll leave that. I don’t know much about Penn State except that to a first approximation the state is run by Penn State alumni. Politically I don’t think it is possible to damage it intentionally. Pitt was a private school until 1966 and is still legally independent of the state (Penn State’s board has lots of state officials and people appointed by the governor). Pitt’s leadership has been publicly hinting that it might go private as the state’s subsidy isn’t enough to make up for the reduced tuition. Only 11% of the budget comes from the state and cuts are survivable with increased tuition and Pitt’s long practice of not giving raises to staff. Plus, the $2.5 billion endowment.
That article mentions the state schools (i.e. the ones the state directly runs) but never says if the vouchering is to replace their support. If that is to happen, it would probably do real damage to those schools. But, as that is never mentioned, I’d guess that either the proposal is nothing but a bargaining tool or the article was written before somebody did research.
LikeLike
“Pitt’s leadership has been publicly hinting that it might go private as the state’s subsidy isn’t enough to make up for the reduced tuition.”
Very interesting.
LikeLike
I’d guess that Pitt was hinting as part of its bargaining strategy, but I have no actual knowledge. Corbett hasn’t been able to hold his own party in the legislature on funding cuts for the universities. He proposed 30% cuts for the state-related schools (except Lincoln?) and the legislative leadership made its own bargain, flat funding in exchange for no tuition increase other than inflation.
LikeLike