I totally agree that it’s not always a matter of closing the small ones, but that’s why I pulled the map of locations from Niche. So I just looked up the schools with under 500 undergrads and their distance to 4-year universities that are unlikely to be impacted by closures due to enrollment.
Penn State Dubois is 52m east of PennWest Clarion, 1h12m NNE of IU of Pennsylvania, 1h22m northwest of Penn State Altoona, and 1h20m west of Penn State UP, all of which have at least 2k undergrads and probably little likelihood of being closed.
Penn State Wilkes Barre is 38m SW from Penn State Scranton (which has between 700-1000, so not huge, but consolidating would make sense); It’s 51m NE of Commonwealth U. -Bloomsburg; it’s 1h6m WNW of East Stroudsburg U., and about 1h30m north of Kutztown U. And that excludes Penn State Schuykill which is in the vicinity and has an undergrad population between 500-700.
Penn State New Kensington is 34m ENE of Pitt. Penn State Greater Allegheny is 23m SE of Pitt. And Penn State Fayette-Eberly is 1h3m SSE from Pitt.
Penn State Shenango is 1h20m NNW from Pitt. It’s 40m WNW from Slippery Rock U. And it’s 1h29m SSW from Penn State Erie/Behrend. And again, that’s excluding schools that Pen State Beaver (pop. of 700-1000 and Penn State New Kensington, pop. sub-500) that are also probably closer than Pitt.
Essentially, I think that people in these communities have decently close access to other options for a 4-year diploma that these mini-colleges can be closed.
Thank you for that link! My D27 is considering playing her sport at the D2/3 level and it can be tricky to figure out the athlete percentage. Watching where some older kids from our club are going I ABSOLUTELY concur that this is the next level of pay to play.
Some hurt more than others. Northland was a special place, and ahead of its time in focusing on environmental thinking and sustainability throughout their curriculum.
What once made it so special is now not much more widely accepted.
Wow - when my son was in one of his four majors during Junior/Senior year of HS - one was Atmospheric Sciences / Meteorology and they were on many lists as leaders.
For context, from that page, the PSU branch campuses enroll about 23,000 students. The seven largest (Abington, Altoona, Behrend, Berks, Brandywine, Harrisburg, and Lehigh Valley) enroll 17,000 of them, leaving the twelve others with 6,000 students combined.
Perhaps the academic programs and instructional capacity at some of those small PSU branch campuses can be moved to nearby community colleges.
Keep in mind they want to grow the main campus to 10000 freshman students enrollment. Last year around 9100 enrolled. Expectations is number of high school students will continue to decline and Penn state needs to adjust for it as they most likely will enroll more students that in the past would have gone to the commonwealth campuses. More and more students want the main campus for the freshman experience. Even the campuses they are keeping have enrollment issues.
I think one campus shares its campus with a community college. We have seen the Commonwealth University close a campus this year at Clearfield And I expect Pitt to do the same as they have done in the past.
I interpreted the article differently. Emphasis added:
require Penn State to close some of its 19 undergraduate branch campuses…But the other 12 will be scrutinized for closure by an internal team that will deliver a recommendation
So they will consider which of the 12 to consider, not necessarily that all 12 would be closed.
I’ll make some guesses right now and will have to wait until sometime before spring commencement to see if I’m right:
They’ll have to take into account overlaps with PASSHE and community colleges, plus overlap with Pitt, all while balancing territorial/regional needs.
Fayette, Greater Allegheny, Pitt Greensburg, and PennWest overlap too much: although they belong to different systems, could Fayette close+ Greater Allegheny&Greensburg merge? Or both close outright or sell their campus to Penn West for specialized operations?
On top of it, Fayette is ~30miles from WVU so a judicious agreement similar to Ohio Eeciprocity would make more sense.
It’s clear PSU had no business opening Greater Allegheny and New Kensington on Pitt’s turf.
The campuses are small but new&well-maintained and could be new boarding schools (for instance, AFAIK PA has nothing like TJ and there’s still international demand for feeder BS) otherwise I’m not sure what they’d do with these. Research park with working from home space?
Shenango is within the reciprocal area with YSU that actually make that 4-year full-fledged university potentially cheaper than 2+2. I don’t think it makes sense to keep it in the current conditions.
Dubois serves a regional need but is basically a CC so if the state could integrate it into its CC/PASSHE system it’d work. Not sure how the system would get to an agreement.
Schuylkill doesn’t really serve much and is close enough to PASSHE schools so they may cut it too, especially since just a few miles East they wouldn’t cut due to population density&growth.
So I would bet on Shenango, Greater Allegheny, New Kensington, Fayette. Perhaps Schuylkill and Dubois depending on regional agreements.
This day was inevitable but a branch like Fayette is tough. They offer 4 year nursing and a few other marketable degrees.
On a map it looks like consolidation wouldn’t be much of a burden but topography is different. Commuting from some areas it serves would be almost impossible. The only way this works is if they negotiate some type of reciprocity with WVU and/or Frostburg. I wish them well.
Yes, rural PA topography makes it hard for a college to have a large commutable service area. Probably part of the reason why there are some very small PSU branches.
Yes.
That’s why I’m not sure about Fayette, it serves a regional need, but with a reciprocity agreement with WVU it could work (WVU has one for Ohio so no reason why it can’t have one for Fayette/Greene? The issue would be the jobs, since WVU is cutting left&right). OR they could use Fayette as a specialized campus the way Pitt did with Titusville, health related certificates AS and BS degrees only (Nursing + various programs).
Western PA is becoming an educational desert; they just invested quite a bit of money into the Beaver campus soI wonder if that will factor in? I would not be the least bit surprised if all 12 are closed. With all the expansion at UP for the health services colleges, they don’t look to me like they are trying to provide nursing , etc degrees elsewhere.
For sure, duplicative campuses, costs, infrastructure are not an optimal use of funds. But there are always students who get crushed in the drive towards efficiency. A college near me closed a few years ago-- financial issues, enrollment issues, all the issues. And a nice chunk of the student body was able to find a home at a peer institution- some close by, some further away-- even the rising seniors. But for the few who were grinding away, working full time, taking the bus to campus after their shift was over-- being welcomed with open arms by a college 50 miles away really doesn’t help these adult learners. They’ve got responsibilities whether for their own kids or someone else’s, or elderly parents, or a disabled spouse…their lives were hard enough balancing job, school, home responsibility. They’re going to add a huge commute to that mix?
So the educational desert phenomenon is real, at least for the non-mobile portion of the population. And yeah, online. But it will take some work on the part of the closing institutions to protect their students credits and transcripts so that they can finish up on a timely basis, and that doesn’t always happen.
