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Enrollment in the state has plummeted, but it has one of the highest ratios of institutions to students in the country. The result is fierce competition over a dwindling pool of applicants.
By  Liam Knox
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Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, stands in front of a downward-trending graph showing state high school graduation rates in 2019. As enrollment nosedived across the state’s public colleges, Greenstein merged campuses in his system.
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
Pennsylvania has a numbers problem.
With nearly 250 colleges and universities, including over 40 public institutions, Pennsylvania has the fourth most higher education institutions of any state, after California, Texas and New York. It is home to four public multicampus institutions—Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE)—in addition to Lincoln University, an HBCU, and a sprawling, decentralized network of community colleges. That’s not even counting the 129 private colleges.
But while there’s no shortage of suppliers, demand for higher education in the Keystone State is nowhere near what it used to be.
While the more popular campuses are stable or growing, many of the state’s public institutions have seen drastic enrollment declines since 2010. Enrollment at Penn State’s University Park campus is up 8 percent since 2010, and Pitt Oakland is up by 1 percent. But when the numbers at the two institutions are considered, including all of their campuses, both have suffered drops of over 30 percent, according to public data from the institutions. PASSHE’s systemwide enrollment has also fallen by 30 percent in the same period.
Those enrollment declines are largely thanks to steep drops at the regional comprehensive universities, which in many cases are over 50 percent. Enrollment at Penn State Hazleton, for instance, has dropped by 64 percent since 2010; at Pitt Titusville it has fallen by 96 percent, leaving only 23 students on campus in 2022.
There are a number of usual suspects behind Pennsylvania’s enrollment crisis, chief among them a general demographic decline in the state. The entire nation is facing a projected demographic cliff in 2026, but Pennsylvania is on the bleeding edge, hemorrhaging residents faster than 46 other states, according to 2022 census data.
But Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, said neither explanation tells the whole story. Affordability is the crux of the state’s enrollment woes, he said, not falling birth rates.
“The demographic cliff is a convenient scapegoat sometimes,” he said. “It allows lawmakers and college leaders to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s inevitable. There’s nothing we can do.’”
In 2021 Pennsylvania ranked 49th in the country in public funding for higher education per full-time student, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association’s higher education finance report. Pennsylvania state funding is tied to enrollment and retention outcomes, which, as has been noted, are on the decline.
As a result, the state’s public institutions are also some of the most expensive in the country. The average cost of attending a state institution for a Pennsylvania resident is $26,040, nearly 70 percent more than the national average, making it the third most expensive state for public higher education, according to a recent Education Data Initiative report.
PASSHE chancellor Daniel Greenstein noted that for many Pennsylvania institutions, his own included, the demographic drop-off doesn’t account for the extent of the enrollment declines. While the state’s college-going demographics have fallen by a little over 5 percent, most colleges’ enrollment drops have been well into the double digits.
“We’re the most affordable option in Pennsylvania, but that’s not a high bar. It’s really expensive to go to public college in this state,” Greenstein said. “Price matters a lot, and differentiating based on affordability matters now more than ever. That’s something we’re trying to focus on.”
For Koricich, this is the crux of the problem that he says lawmakers aren’t seeing clearly: less state funding means less affordable college, which in turn contributes to a vicious cycle of enrollment declines and student exodus from the state. Many of those students who might otherwise have gone to regional universities and remained in the area then also resettle after graduating, compounding existing workforce shortages.
“If you keep making college unaffordable to people, why would we be surprised that they want to leave?” he said.
Greenstein echoed those concerns, though he feels that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are willing to help buoy higher education when tied to workforce outcomes. But he said time is of the essence, as neighboring states with more public funding offer similar educational benefits for a fraction of the price—like New York, which offers free tuition for students whose family income is under $125,000 a year.
“When states around us are acting in a very deliberate and aggressive way, you’re gonna find our students leaving the state to get their education, and they don’t come back,” Greenstein said. “At this point we gotta boogie, because we’re not too far off.”
Last summer, PASSHE merged six of its campuses into two multicampus institutions in a process the system called “integration,” in order to cut costs and center student success, according to Greenstein, as well as maintain the system as a driver of workforce development and social mobility in the state.
Bashar Hanna, president of Commonwealth University—which is made up of the former Lock Haven, Bloomsburg and Mansfield University campuses in the rural center and north of the state—said the integration process made a big difference. Not only did it reduce inefficiencies and expenses, he said; it also helped them make the case the case for the commonwealth to students from local school districts by allowing them to combine their resources for recruitment and student success.
Last year enrollments decreased at all three campuses, but Hanna said new student deposits for the fall are up by 8 percent this year.
“Rural Pennsylvania is not thriving … we wanted to make sure that our students were going to college locally, meaning within 75 miles of home, and then the likelihood of them staying after they graduate goes up exponentially,” Hanna said. “We’re not back to pre-COVID enrollment levels, but we’re certainly much better off than we were a few years ago.”
State lawmakers rewarded those efforts by approving PASSHE’s largest budget increase ever last year, at 16 percent. That was followed by another 6 percent increase in this year’s proposed budget, which is currently stalled in the General Assembly.
Other public institutions are still floundering. Penn State has been vocally lobbying for more state support, claiming that it has been comparatively underfunded for years. In September the university requested a 48 percent appropriations increase.
Lisa Maria Powers, Penn State’s assistant vice president of media and executive communications, said the university has had the lowest per-student state funding of any in Pennsylvania for over half a century. According to a university analysis, Penn State is funded at $5,600 per resident student, compared to $8,275 for Temple and $9,049 for Pitt; the national per-student average for state funding was $9,327 in 2021, according to a SHEEO analysis.
PASSHE is also the only state-owned system in Pennsylvania, with a Board of Governors entirely appointed by the governor with approval from the Legislature. Penn State, Pitt and Temple describe themselves as “state-related” and have much more leeway to operate as independent bodies. The majority of their governing boards are elected by alumni.
Koricich said that helps explain why PASSHE has taken on the task of consolidation and fat-trimming while Penn State has left its sprawling network of campuses largely untouched, despite many of them experiencing much higher enrollment declines. But he is not a fan of PASSHE’s integration plan. It has a bevy of critics, in fact, something Koricich realizes comes with the territory of making difficult decisions. He just doesn’t think those decisions were necessary—or that they’ll lead to enrollment increases.
“Now you’ve thrown six regional publics in front of a freight train, for what?” Koricich said. “To me, the state’s willingness to just let PASSHE kind of fall on the sword is missing the fundamental problem here, which is that the flagships are just sucking up all of the oxygen.”
Greenstein said the cuts associated with integration did not affect student services or popular programs.
“We did this to serve students better,” he said. “Somehow, someway, this problem has to be addressed or Pennsylvania higher ed is going to be in a bad state.”
Robert Gregerson, president of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, is working to mitigate the effects of a 27 percent enrollment decline in the past decade. He said that while the Pitt system was too small for mergers to be a consideration there, he understood the path PASSHE was taking.
“The era of continual growth is in the rearview mirror,” he said. “State institutions not only in Pennsylvania but across the Midwest and Northeast are going to have to figure out what rightsizing means for them.”
Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states with no state higher education commission or governing board to oversee its public universities; each institution has a highly prized and carefully guarded autonomy.
For Koricich, that’s part of the problem.
“There is no coordinating board, there is no governing board, there is no referee to say all of these different institutions in different sectors with different finances have to play nicely together,” he said.
Penn State, Koricich said, has benefited the most from this oversight vacuum. With 20 campuses across the state, it is by far the largest higher education presence in Pennsylvania; PASSHE had 14 before its integration plan took effect—it now has 10—and Pitt has five. Koricich said that without state intervention, Penn State has been able to eat away at a dwindling pool of in-state students looking to attend a regional public institution, exacerbating the enrollment crisis for some of the state’s most hard-hit colleges and universities.
“Some of [Penn State’s campuses] are within 30 miles of PASSHE schools; some of them are right on top of community colleges. One of those places has a brand name that everyone recognizes and the others don’t,” he said. “[State lawmakers] have let this behemoth just sort of run roughshod over higher ed in the state, and they haven’t done anything to control it.”
Powers, of Penn State, pushed back on this portrayal. She said the university’s branch locations are crucial to its land-grant mission, and that they serve primarily local populations of underserved students.
“Our Commonwealth Campuses have been around a long time, some nearly 100 years; and all of Penn State’s campuses pre-date the formation of PASSHE. In addition, almost all of our campuses were in place well before the introduction of community colleges in Pennsylvania,” Powers wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
Some believe the current crisis requires more coordination between the disparate independent institutions and could lead lawmakers to explore the possibility of a central oversight body. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat elected last year, called for a rethinking of the loose structure during a budget address in March.
“What we are doing right now isn’t working,” he said. “Colleges are competing with one another for a limited dollar: they’re duplicating degree programs, they’re driving up the cost and they’re actually reducing access.”
Some, like Greenstein, prefer incentives and market-based solutions to the issue; while PASSHE is consolidating campuses, he said the move may not be right for other Pennsylvania institutions.
But Gregerson said that if there were a time to experiment with statewide coordination, it’s now.
“There have been conversations about that in the past which didn’t produce any change. But I think we might be at a point now where folks will take it more seriously,” he said. “Whether there’s the political will for that, I don’t know. But I think it could be helpful.”

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There was surprisingly not a ton of action in the college volleyball world last week. At least not like we have become accustomed to. I probably could have sent out the same Power 10 as last week and called it a day. But, volleyball still happened and I got to watch some great matchups, so the more I sat on it, I made a few changes. 
It’s a Power 10 after all, right? 
If I could have it my way, I would have multiple ties. This is what my ideal Power 10 would like this week: 
T-1 — Nebraska and Wisconsin
T-3 — Stanford, Louisville, Florida
T-6 — Oregon and Washington State
8 — BYU
9 — Pittsburgh
10 — Tennessee
But that’s no fun… so let’s try and order them. At least for this week:
One of the biggest changes coms right at the top, as Nebraska takes over the No. 1 spot for me. Now, I easily could’ve kept Wisconsin here. Both teams are undefeated on the season and Wisconsin did absolutely nothing to move down. 
But when you compare the two, Nebraska has been a machine. They are not just winning, they are dominating. This past week they swept two ranked opponents, including a clean sweep over the committee’s No. 10 team, Minnesota. They have dropped all of three sets this season. This team certainly has the talent, but we thought perhaps they would have some growing pains with such a young core. Bergen Reiley taking over at setter as just a freshman, Harper Murray and Andi Jackson coming in and starting as freshmen… but, no. If you thought that, you were mistaken. They look as mature and seasoned as it gets. The offense is spectacular, but even when they are not hitting their best, the Huskers will still dominate the game defensively to make up for it. They lead the nation in opponent hitting percentage — holding opponents to a .101 clip on average. This defense is top-notch, led by Lexi Rodriguez. So although Wisconsin and Nebraska are practically tied in my mind, I’ll throw the Huskers a bone for how dominating they’ve been. 
Like I mentioned above, the Badgers did nothing to move down. Wisconsin secured two sweeps this past week over Northwestern and Indiana to follow up a five-set come-from-behind win over Florida. In my mind, they are tied for No. 1. The only difference with Nebraska right now is just how dominating their wins are — the Badgers have been pushed to five sets a few more times this season. 
This is a national championship-caliber team, though. The talent and experience is immense and this team is hard to defend. They can quite literally hurt you from anywhere on the court. Not many missing pieces or weak spots on this team. I am so excited for the Big Ten race this season with Nebraska and Wisconsin the clear top dogs. 
Here comes the change of heart — Stanford, Louisville and Florida are so difficult to order. I had Stanford lower because it had one more loss than Louisville and Florida. But, if you based on head-to-head alone, it would be Florida (who beat Stanford handedly), then Stanford (who beat Louisville in five), then Louisville. But there are other factors too, and multiple ways to do this. The Cardinal had a gauntlet of a non-conference schedule, and one of their losses to Florida was without Caitie Baird. Plus, the loss to Nebraska doesn’t seem as bad when they are the No. 1 team in my eyes. 
Beat the Buffs ✔️#GoStanford pic.twitter.com/VWWGHSLBcg
I’ll go with the Cardinals next, even though, again, this could be ordered many ways. The win over Washington State is also starting to look better as the Cougars continue to make waves this season with big, ranked wins. Louisville is a complete team with one of the best liberos in the country in Elena Scott. 
A special day in L&N Federal Credit Union Arena ❤️

1,022 career digs and counting for @elenaascott! #GoCards pic.twitter.com/8CbyQEIfcb
And then Florida. Even though Kennedy Muff is an outstanding setter, I don’t think this is the same team without Alexis Stucky right away. They are going to need some time to adjust to a new setter, and re-build up those connections. So that is the only reason why I decided to put a full-strength Louisville and Stanford ahead of them. But, gosh they pulled out another five-set come-from-behind win over a strong Georgia team. This team loves five-setters and you have got to give them so much credit. Sofia Victoria and AC Fitzpatrick have been incredible too, taking some of the load off of Kennedy Martin and making this offense a little harder to defend. Elli McKissock is always giving her team extra opportunities and this team always impresses me in serve receive. Sounds cliché too, but the heart of this team is a big factor. They are rallying together after losing Stucky, and they are fighting together day in and day out. I know they are only going to continue to improve the more time they have with Muff as the season goes on. If I could have them tied at No. 3, I would. 
I’m keeping Oregon at No. 6 for now. This spot will be very quickly decided on the court this week as the Ducks take on Washington State. The Ducks and Cougars have similar resumes so far this season, so I am pumped for this matchup. Oregon seems to have all of the pieces as well, and they only slipped up once in a five-set loss to Minnesota this year. 
The Cougars stay put at No. 7 with the Oregon matchup looming. This team skyrocketed into the rankings this season, but just survived Arizona in five sets last week. Either way, they pulled out the win and only have one loss on the season to Louisville. 
COUGS REMAIN RED, HOT, AND ROLLING! 11 STRAIGHT!
📺 Pac-12 Arizona pic.twitter.com/YCXPXUErtX
BYU heads to Austin to take on Texas twice this week. The Cougars were almost my team of the week after taking down Baylor and Houston handedly in Week 5. It is really great to see more ranked matchups on their schedule now that they are in the Big 12, and they have two big ones this week. 
Don’t blink👀 pic.twitter.com/lqVCZsdO4o
Pitt was not included in the DI committee’s first top-10 reveal on Sunday, but I’m keeping the Panthers in my rankings over teams with more losses. The Panthers have two losses, but to top-10 teams — Oregon and BYU. Some teams below them have worse wins to squads further outside the top 10 or not ranked at all. Pitt has swept its last five opponents as well. 
Welcome to the Power 10, Tennessee. We have another SEC team entering the chat. This was Georgia Tech’s spot last week, but the Jackets’ wins look less desirable now as Ohio State continues to lose more games. GT still has the win over Penn State, but a loss to Georgia too. Tennessee, on the other hand, has been on fire with just one loss — in five sets — to Wisconsin. The Vols just swept Kentucky last week and Morgahn Fingall has looked like one of the best players in the country. So welcome, Tennessee. 
What a win 🤩 pic.twitter.com/tDKoaimusL
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