HARRISBURG (March 5) – Colleges part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education offer tuition rates that are well below the national average for public universities despite dwindling state appropriations.

The 14 colleges that comprise the system have been able keep tuition rates low even though the state has reduced its funding to them by 34 percent over the past decade,

PASSHE Chancellor John Cavanaugh told the Senate Appropriations Committee Feb. 24.

In Gov. Ed Rendell’s proposed budget, PASSHE is slated to receive $465.2 million, which is the same as it got this year.

Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery, said he believes the education options the PASSHE colleges offer for the money are “very, very good.”

“But, in every higher education system those costs are going up and it’s becoming more and more difficult for people to pay those bills or they graduate with student loans and parent loans that are just ridiculous and then [have to] pay for them for years and decades,” Greenleaf said.

He asked Cavanaugh what the tuition increases have been over the years, and what is the single most driving influence behind those costs?

Cavanaugh referred Greenleaf to copies of a small document he handed out before the budget hearing that lists the tuition rates for the past 10 years. In 2000-01, the average annual tuition rate at the PASSHE colleges was $3,792, according to the chart.

This fiscal year, according to the chart, the average tuition at PASSHE colleges is $5,554.

The document also indicated that the “total cost of attendance is $564 below the national average for public universities, and $2,498 below the average in the Middle States region, which comprises Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.”

“We’ve been given good kudos from across the country for having one of the very lowest rates of tuition increase over the last decade in the country,” Cavanaugh said. “We’ve gone from being above the national average in our price to significantly below.”

He said: “We are $500 give or take below the national average in our tuition costs. But if you look at the mid-Atlantic region, which is where most of our students are going to come from, we’re $2,500 less than the average in the region.”

Cavanaugh said Greenleaf is correct in that labor costs comprise most of the budget. It’s 73 percent, he said.

However, PASSHE “eliminated about $200 million in costs over the last decade just in our ability to negotiate good costs on contracts in strategic sourcing alone,” Cavanaugh said.

“Just in the last couple of years we’ve been able to avoid another $31 million in costs,” he said. “The most recent example of that is we re-negotiated our e-learning course platforms and we are saving $2.5 million a year just on that.”

Cavanaugh said with all the “different pieces that we put together on energy savings and strategic sourcing and all, we tried to take out as much as possible so we can support those low tuition increases.”

Greenleaf asked how much operational costs have increased?

“Our revenues have been going down for the past decade, so our costs have been going down for the past decade,” Cavanaugh said. He said state appropriations per student have dropped 34 percent over the past 10 years.

“When you add tuition back into that, our revenues per student have dropped 13 percent over the past decade,” Cavanaugh said.

Greenleaf was impressed with Cavanaugh’s comments. “Maybe you should be giving some of your information to other institutions of higher education?” he said. “So congratulations on that.”

Sen. John Rafferty, R-Montgomery, wondered whether PASSHE colleges were experiencing increased enrollment?

Cavanaugh said 13 of the 14 are at record enrollment. The one that is not is Cheyney University, he said.

However, Cavanaugh said Cheyney is now in the design phase for a new residence hall that is expected to lure more students. The new residence hall will be the first one in over 30 years at the college, he said.

The other 13 PASSHE colleges, meanwhile, have experienced record enrollment, Cavanaugh said.

Nearly 117,000 students – 90 percent of which are Pennsylvania residents – enrolled at PASSHE colleges in 2009, according to documentation from Cavanaugh.

Enrollment at all the colleges increased by 10.4 percent since 2004, according to a chart in the document.

In addition to Cheyney University, the other PASSHE colleges include Bloomsburg University; California University; Clarion University; East Stroudsburg University; Edinboro University; Indiana University; Kutztown University; Lock Haven University; Mansfield University; Millersville University; Shippensburg University; Slippery Rock University, and West Chester University.

In another matter, Sen. Bob Tomlinson, R-Bucks, wondered how the state plans to use over $99 million in federal economic stimulus dollars for expansion of broadband services at PASSHE colleges?

The Keystone Initiative for Network-Based Education and Research, or KINDBER, was awarded $99.6 million in federal economic stimulus dollars in February for a project to extend a fiber optic cable network by nearly 1,700 miles throughout Pennsylvania.

Cavanaugh told Tomlinson PASSHE is “very pleased to have been the organization to facilitate the bigger conversation that led to the creation of [KINDBER], which will receive the grant and not PASSHE.

“We’re part of that and we facilitated that conversation, but I want to make it clear that we’re one part of a much bigger consortium,” Cavanaugh said. “The grant really is to create the first integrated fiber optic network for Pennsylvania that will have very high bandwidth.”

Pennsylvania, Cavanaugh said, “is one of the few states that currently does not have a high bandwidth integrated network.” This fact, he said, makes it “very difficult for the higher education institutions, the medical community, the business community, [and] the economic development community to attract those businesses to do the kind of research you need to do.”

PASSHE’s role is “to be part of that bigger consortium of all the major higher education sectors,” he said. “It’s the first time all of them have come together around one issue in the state’s history.”

Cavanaugh said the institutions presently have a way to communicate via broadband, “but the issue is the bandwidth [and] how much information you can fit through that pipe.”

“We’re taking it up quite a number of notches in terms of how much information [can be fit through the links],” he said. “Also, it will be integrated across some of the higher end networks that are local networks in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or around State College.”

Cavanaugh said when the project is completed it will mark “the first time all of those networks will be integrated into one network [thus providing an] expediential increase to bandwidth for economic development and research purposes.”

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