Maybe he felt the need to get out from under his father's shadow. Maybe he was expressing the secret wish of university insiders. Maybe he was trying to think for himself. When Scott Paterno advocated eliminating ALL of Penn State's budgetary allocation from Harrisburg in order to shift the remaining money to public schools, he was really calling for the privatization of higher education in Pennsylvania.
Paterno argues that surely Penn State will find some way to make up the difference. Obviously, the administration would manage to "generate" savings, but that would include eliminating many of the public services the university provides Commonwealth citizens. Tuition would rise much more quickly than under current conditions and, more importantly, admissions would redefined. The obligation to support students from all corners of the state would disappear.
Penn State has always prided itself on the number of students who are the first members of their family to attend college. That is the concern of a public university. With privatization, that idealism would fade in just a few years. The university's broad commitment to agriculture would drop away quickly as well. The Ag School is already under serious budgetary pressure and, without a doubt, a private university would confine its agricultural research only to those subfields that generate high federal grants or that have new commercial potential. There would be little interest in training the children of farmers.
A private university chases an entirely different pool of applicants than a public university. Penn State would start a much greater recruitment effort in Korea and China than in Erie or York. Private universities have an entirely different set of peers against which they measure themselves. This change would not come about immediately, but once the old land grant obligations are cast aside in the name of free market education which always pursues the global elite student and not the local high school kid, Penn State would move in a direction that would completely alter its relationship to the Commonwealth.
The real losers would be society and the citizens of the state who need to educate their children. Rural poverty would increase even further as generations would be priced out of quality higher education. The divide between the classes would grow as Penn State woos the metropolitan elite as opposed to the rural workers. The loss of public funding would not just end the idealism that made the university Pennsylvania's sole land grant institution in 1863, it would further diminish the quality of life for thousands in this state.
For what it's worth, this basically echoes point for point the letter I myself wrote to Gov. Corbett. Well said.
ReplyDeleteVery articulate and quietly impassioned statement of the case, Dan.
ReplyDelete