The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education is taking steps to combine several of its individual universities into multi-campus institutions, sharing resources with the idea of reducing costs amid flagging enrollment.
It’s a good plan. It acknowledges some of the cost-cutting mechanisms that might happen in the business world after a corporate merger.
But just like those mergers, there will be downsides. While the obvious ones would be job losses and program closures, not all of them will be cuts. Some will be surpluses.
At the campuses in question, one thing the schools could have in great, unused quantities will be dorms.
Student housing has been in a building boom in recent years. It hasn’t just been at the PASSHE schools. Other colleges also have been beefing up the supply of on-campus opportunities. Penn State has been on a building kick, not just at the University Park campus, but at many of the Commonwealth Campuses, too. If schools aren’t building new dorms, they are renovating old ones to make them more attractive to today’s students.
Why do they need to be attractive? You pick a school, not a dorm, right? Not anymore. More and more students are gravitating toward a college experience that doesn’t happen in the cinder block cube with a communal bathroom that was standard in another era.
There are practical concerns about updates. Forty years ago, students didn’t have the same power consumption concerns. Today they need computers and other electronic devices to do their schoolwork, especially when pandemic procedures might restrict them to their residences.
There are also other understandable features to address, such as privacy and security. With the attention universities are giving to sexual assault, date rape and other factors that weren’t discussed years ago, individual rooms with locking doors and bathrooms that are less like locker rooms are a smart upgrade.
But then there are the purely aesthetic choices. Today there is student housing that seems more like a hybrid of theme park and beach-set reality show. One Arizonacomplex has a lazy river, golf simulator and sauna. None of these are the kind of thing you will find at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, but it still points to the private competition some universities face.
The six PASSHE schools merging into two multi-campus networks are facing a total of 11 older buildings facing demolition, but just taking them out of service that way is going to cost $21 million. At the same time, the schools have payments to make for the bond issues on their newer buildings, and are still struggling to fill them as enrollments fall by as much as 30% to 40%.
It is a shame that such problems exist when many communities in Pennsylvania are in dire need of workforce housing and low-income senior housing. While it’s not the universities’ job to solve that problem, giving it the old college try might be a way to fix their own bottom lines, perhaps via public-private partnerships.
The universities seem to be scratching their heads and wondering what to do with these extra structures. Maybe they should turn to their students — the same bright young minds that are coming up with new entrepreneurial concepts — and get them to help find a solution.
— The Tribune-Review, Greensburg/TNS
