Two state university systems shrink over a year and a decade

For years I’ve been projecting and observing a decline in American higher education. Reality keeps giving examples of those projections becoming observable data. Today’s case in point is a pair of state university systems, one in Pennsylvania, the other in New York.

First, enrollment in the fourteen-campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) system slid down 5.4% this semester, according to Susan Snyder. That’s steeper than the overall national decline of 3.2%, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

This is also part of a terrible decade-long drop. The 3.5% loss is “its biggest one-year percentage decline in more than a decade” — i.e., since the Great Recession period. Listen to how far PASSHE has fallen in that time:

PASSHE’s enrollment fell to 88,651, down 5.4%, or more than 5,000 students, from last year — that’s about a $36 million loss in revenue, according to the system.

Since 2010, when system enrollment approached 120,000, most one-year declines have been 2% or 3%, but enrollment has dropped a total of nearly 26% during that time.

More than 25%! From 120,000 to under 89,000 is a very large plummet. Thinking of how much those institutions depend on tuition and fees for revenue shows what a crisis the decline represents.

Broken down by individual campuses, the slide is uneven, with some campuses hurt worse than others, and a couple actually…