The gap between Penn State University’s sprawling main campus and its 20 branches can be measured these days in ways more personal and profound than highway miles.
Stung by double-digit enrollment losses, the branch campuses and their students are about to lose 10% of their faculty and staff to buyouts starting this month. Those employees helped bring a flagship public education at less-than-main-campus prices to locales in or around New Kensington, McKeesport, Uniontown, Monaca and Shenango in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
But University Park appears to be on a different trajectory.
Officials are making room to boost first-year enrollment on the main campus by 825 students, a move that eventually could push University Park enrollment above 50,000 students for the first time in Penn State’s history.
It illustrates what some say is a divide that is growing as higher education emerges from the pandemic. While many small, regional, public and private campuses struggle — and in some cases close, such as Monday’s announcement by Pittsburgh Technical College in Oakdale — highly selective campuses still see growth.
Growth amid contraction
At University Park, it explains a planned $40.4 million repurposing of the former Palmer Museum of Art site. The aim is to “create as many large general purpose classrooms and related circulation and support spaces as possible,” according to a Penn State facilities document.
“Demand for University Park continues to grow, and we are planning to leverage that demand,” Matt Melvin, vice president for enrollment management at Penn State, said in a question-and-answer posted to the university’s website early this year.
The university wants to boost the entering class from 9,175 students to 9,500 starting this fall, as housing capacity allows. Ultimately, leaders envision “moving toward 10,000 students across the next several admissions cycles,” Melvin said.
That would be a 9% increase.
Never mind that the undergraduate market in general has been depressed for years by fewer traditional-age residential college students, worries about cost and debt, and doubts among high school graduates about the value of a four-year degree versus entering a strong job market.
A potential second main campus classroom hall near the Forest Resources building is also being eyed.
“These projects are in the planning stages and are contingent upon approval by the Penn State Board of Trustees,” the university said in a statement responding to questions from TribLive. “No firm date has been established for when these projects will go to the trustees for review.”
Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi and others say main campus growth has kept university-wide enrollment relatively stable, despite losses in the past decade of 16% to 50% on most branch campuses, which Penn State calls collectively its commonwealth campus system. Some have just a few hundred students.
Bendapudi said the university is making strategic investments in growth areas even as it works to eliminate by June 2025 a projected deficit that once stood at $140 million. Leaders say the branches remain important to Penn State’s land grant mission.
But some on the branches are deeply skeptical, as reflected in an open letter sent in March to Gov. Josh Shapiro in advance of July’s board of trustees meeting. Its nearly 900 signatures included a number of faculty and staff from Penn State New Kensington.
More than half of the $94 million in spending cuts announced this year target the branches. A 14.1% reduction at those locations versus a 1.7% cut for University Park academic colleges means resources are being shifted to the main campus, the signers said.
It is an “unjust abrogation of the university’s land grant responsibility to students and communities throughout the commonwealth,” the letter asserts.
“Even more concerning, Penn State’s new budget model will distribute the state’s $242 million General Support allocation to incentivize enrollments at its more expensive locations while penalizing regional campuses that have lower tuition and higher rates of in-state students,” the letter added.
As of last fall, Pennsylvanians accounted for 77% of branch campus enrollment compared with 52% at University Park, the letter states.
Last month, Penn State trustees approved a $700 million renovation to Beaver Stadium, home to Nittany Lions football. It was a spending choice not lost on some faculty members who learned their jobs could be in jeopardy.
Feeling the pinch
As college enrollment has declined, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, campus closure rates have reached about one private college a week, said Jason E. Lane, president and CEO of the Adelphi, Md.-based National Association of Higher Education Systems.
“In general, flagship institutions appear to be less affected than regional or branch institutions,” he said.
Inside HigherEd identified upward of a dozen four-year nonprofit closures during 2023 of “mostly small, private, tuition-dependent institutions with meager endowments that have seen enrollment slipping for years and have been unable to recover from those sustained losses.”
Among those nonprofit four-year schools was Alderson Broaddus University in Philippi, W.Va. Its enrollment had fallen over the decade from 1,117 students to 670.
Before stepping down as University of Pittsburgh chancellor last year, Patrick Gallager put it another way.
“For less selective schools, there is intense competition … for a smaller and smaller pool of students,” Gallagher said. “For the more selective schools, there is intense competition … among the students who are competing with their applications to get into this small number of selective institutions.”
When a college closes, students like Hanna Tourney, 20, of Lock Haven are left reeling. She settled on Pittsburgh Technical College during her junior year of high school, unaware of the enrollment and financial woes and internal strife that, on Monday, left her and others without a college, effective Aug. 9. A residence hall assistant, she has less than a month to move out of campus housing.
“The worst part for me, honestly, was that I signed up to go to this college way before anything like this came out,” said Tourney, who expects to move home for the summer and then finish her degree in web design at the Community College of Allegheny County starting this fall.
Days earlier, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia abruptly closed its doors.
History of branch campuses
Penn State’s system of undergraduate branches dates to the 1930s and was meant primarily to meet the needs of students who were location-bound during the Great Depression, according to a university web-published history.
Even after sharp enrollment losses, the branches educate almost 24,000 of Penn State’s systemwide enrollment of 88,000.
On Thursday, Penn State Greater Allegheny sophom*ores Mikayla Bilbie and Carmen Breegle spoke to TribLive on the McKeesport campus about the advantage of learning near where they live. They see the small setting as a plus.
“It’s just so close to my house that it’s easy,” said Bilbie, 19, of Jefferson Hills, who originally didn’t know whether she wanted to attend a branch campus. “I like how small it is.”
She commuted last year and will live on campus this coming year as a psychology major. Attending a branch campus is more cost effective and she was able to thrive, she said.
“I met so many people I love,” Bilbie said. “Personally, I don’t do well with big, crowded things, so this is nice. It’s like high school almost, size-wise.”
Breegle, 19, of West Mifflin, is studying biobehavioral health and is in the 2+2 program. That’s when students spend their first two years of college at a branch campus and their second two years at University Park in Centre County. The 2+2 program was the reason she applied to Greater Allegheny in the first place, and she likes the option to commute.
“I really liked how small it was … especially getting acclimated to college before going up to (University Park),” she said.
But there is angst on campus, too.
Shelbie Howard, a library operations supervisor for University Libraries at Penn State Greater Allegheny for three years, said she was a little heartbroken over the news of the reductions.
Though she wasn’t eligible for a buyout, she knows colleagues who were and decided to take it.
“It will take a large hit on all of us moving forward,” Howard said.
Is college worth it?
Beyond demographic hurdles, higher education has an image problem, said Julie Wollman, a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and a former president of Edinboro University (now a Penn West University campus.)
She points to a Pew Research Center finding that only 47% of adults saw college as worth it, even if they do not have to take out loans.
Penn State, which has a national brand, is among the most expensive public universities.
“I wonder if they are making a bet that may not be wise,” Wollman said of Penn State’s growth plans. “A 9% enrollment increase in an increasingly competitive context where all signs point to declines or at best stability seems like a bit of denial.”
For generations, branch campuses were feeders to the main campus and a way to reach college-bound students near their homes. But recently announced branch closures involving the Universities of Wisconsin, including UWMilwaukee at Waukesha, over enrollment and funding have hit home. It will close in spring 2025.
Wollman said the role branches play in states with population loss, including Pennsylvania, is “already diminishing, and they will likely result in some of them closing, which is probably wise.”
“Saying we’ll take the students who might have gone to a newly closed campus and bring them to University Park may also ease the political pushback,” she said.
But not everyone wants to or can travel cross-state to the main campus, said Christopher L. Harben, a business professor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend campus.
“We provide a Penn State education for an area that Penn State would not reach without us,” he said. “Same thing with Hazleton. Same thing with Harrisburg.”
At the same time, he said, there might need to be fewer campuses and a new business model.
“They think they can enroll themselves out of it. That’s not going to happen,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to create new programs to access (and) to get more students to come because there just aren’t new students to come.
“And if we start trying to do that, then the only new students we’re going to get are being cannibalized from other Penn State campuses or taken from other campuses.”
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