As president of Penn State, I promised to keep you informed of important issues affecting our community, and it is with that goal that I write to you today. The issue at hand is the affordability of higher education.
Recently President Obama delivered the highlights of his “Blueprint for Keeping College Affordable and Within Reach for All Americans” and on Tuesday, Feb. 7, Gov. Tom Corbett will release his budget recommendations, including the 2012-13 appropriation for Penn State.
Given the importance of these two proposals to Penn State's current and future students, as well as to faculty and staff, I wish to address a couple of key points.
First, President Obama said, “There is no greater predictor of success than a college education,” and the facts support this assertion.
The mean annual earnings of U.S. college graduates with a baccalaureate degree are almost double those of high school graduates. Similarly, in December 2011, the unemployment rate among college graduates was 4.1 percent compared to 8.7 percent for high school graduates.
However, this divergence in earnings over the past several decades has contributed to reduced support for public funding in higher education; the rationale being that students and their parents should be expected to absorb more of the costs associated with higher education. In other words, higher education -- in this view -- has become more of a private investment than a societal good.
Thurgood Marshall once observed, however, “None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps,” and it's clearer than ever that students and their families need support to reach their educational goals.
At Penn State, this support has traditionally come through our partnership with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the federal government, which provides a majority of student financial aid, increasingly in the form of loans. We know that the U.S. government and specifically the Department of Education have put colleges and universities on notice, emphasizing that support would only continue if we do our part to keep costs down.
As I told our Board of Trustees two weeks ago, “I believe the great challenge before all of us in the higher education sector is to define a path forward that will allow us to improve learning outcomes for our students while finding ways to deliver that education at a rate of cost increase that is less than we have experienced over the past two decades. In short, we must challenge ourselves to become more effective at what we do while simultaneously being more efficient at what we do. This must be everyone's goal: faculty, staff, students and administrators, working together.”
Finally, our state's publicly supported universities are one of the reasons why Pennsylvania is seen as one of the great centers of higher education in America. And as an economic development engine, Penn State alone has an impact in the Commonwealth approaching $20 billion annually. Over the past two decades, Penn State's appropriation from the Commonwealth has seen a dramatic downward decline, including a 19.6 percent cut last year. We are now supporting 24 campuses and 96,000 students at our 1995 funding levels in state support. If this decline continues, it is at least fair for all of us in higher education and in state governments across the nation to ask whether the present model of the publicly assisted land-grant university will be sustainable years into the future.
I encourage you to review the details of the Governor's budget proposal on Tuesday, and stay tuned. I'll have more information to share in the upcoming weeks.
President Rodney Erickson