Pitt, Penn State branch campuses bleeding enrollment; decline expected to continue

Brianna Guinther studies nursing minutes from her Greensburg home at a University of Pittsburgh branch campus, a leafy suburban setting with plenty of quiet study spaces and a new Life Sciences Building.

Having Pitt-Greensburg as an option spared her a more arduous commute as she pursues a four-year degree. She does not own a car but can rely on her mother for short rides to and from the Hempfield campus.

“I like it, honestly,” said Guinther, 19, who is approaching her second year at Pitt-Greensburg. “It’s very small, so a lot of the classes are, like, smaller groups. You really get to know your professors.”

But the smallness that she relishes also represents a concern: Enrollment at Pitt-Greensburg has declined 27% since 2010, to 1,325 students.

In a state that some say has overbuilt its public higher education system and now faces a prolonged enrollment slump, Pitt-Greensburg isn’t alone when it comes to declining enrollment at Pennsylvania’s branch campuses. Many of the campuses are facing even direr declines.

Since 2010, enrollment at Penn State New Kensington in Upper Burrell has tumbled by 47%, to 460 students, according to data examined by the Tribune-Review. Penn State Greater Allegheny, on the border of McKeesport and White Oak, has 363 students, down 53% from 2010.

At 2,041 students, Pitt-­Johnstown, the university’s oldest and largest branch campus that was founded in 1927, is 31% smaller than it was a decade and a half ago. A 61% enrollment drop has left Penn State Shenango in Sharon, Mercer County, with 281 students, smaller than many high schools.

The falling numbers are not unique to these schools — all of them taxpayer supported — or to Pennsylvania. Nationwide, a shrinking college-age population, worries about debt, a roaring job market and doubts about the value of a four-year degree have depressed campus enrollment for a decade, particularly in states in the Northeast and Midwest.

A 29% enrollment drop across the State System of Higher Education since 2010 has led to the controversial mergers of six of its 14 universities into two, amid warnings from state leaders that those six schools with enrollments of 1,800 to 7,700 each could not survive on their own.

Less public attention has accompanied a similar drop across the branch campuses of Pitt and Penn State, whose enrollments rely more heavily on in-state students than either university’s still-growing main campus.

As state-related universities, Pitt and Penn State are public but not state-owned and have more autonomy to set priorities within their institutions, experts say.

Both universities insist their branches remain critical to ensuring college access across Pennsylvania and to the vitality of their communities.

Responding to the decade-long slump, the branches have added course offerings in rapidly growing areas such as nursing and the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Increasingly, they emphasize teaching skills most immediately sought by local employers.

“We’re constantly looking at what are the programs that we need that are both interesting to students and critical to employers,” said Penn State Provost Justin Schwartz.

Still, the downward enrollment trend has continued on branch campuses. From 2010 to fall 2022, the declines averaged 36% across Pitt’s four branch campuses and 30% across 18 of the 19 Penn State Commonwealth campuses that deliver mostly undergraduate, in-person instruction. One of the Penn State branches, Harrisburg, experienced an 8% increase.

Penn State Great Valley, a special mission campus near Philadelphia that delivers graduate education and worker training, is down by 66% since 2010, to 271 students, university data show.

Altogether, 14 of the 20 locations enroll fewer than 1,000 students.

‘It shouldn’t be ‘The Hunger Games’ “

In March, Josh Shapiro became the latest Pennsylvania governor to call for rethinking the sprawling system of state-owned, public and private colleges.

“What we are doing right now is not 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, particularly for so many in our minority communities,” Shapiro said in his first state budget address. “As enrollment declines and questions about the value of a college degree persist, it’s on all of us to once and for all have an honest dialogue about higher education in Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania lacks a coordinating body to ensure its multiple campus systems are working in sync in a state also crowded with private colleges.

In the late 1990s, citing population loss and program duplication, the state initially opposed a Penn State bid to add four-year degree programs on branches that were largely two-year paths to its main University Park campus. It was later approved.

For decades, policymakers and others have worried that Pennsylvania’s laissez-faire approach enabled campuses to build out programs without regard for the impact on other institutions, including those in their backyard.

“It shouldn’t be ‘The Hunger Games,’ where everyone is fighting for everything,” said Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Boone, N.C.-based Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges.

The depth of Pennsylvania’s challenge is clear when branches with Penn State’s name recognition can’t fill enough seats, said Koricich, who grew up in Pennsylvania and teaches at Appalachian State University.

“Brand doesn’t save you from everything,” he said.

Still, he’s not convinced that closing campuses is the answer, especially in underserved regions where many of the smallest campuses are.

“We talk about college choice, but if there is no college, then you have no choice,” he said.

Pennsylvania still will have students who can’t afford to drive long distances to a campus and lack reliable high-speed internet for remote instruction.

“We shouldn’t create education deserts as a policy choice,” Koricich said. “Does Pennsylvania have too many colleges? I’m still not willing to concede that since we haven’t measured it.”

‘Are we meeting our mission?’

Just more than half of Penn State’s 88,000 students are at University Park. About 29,000 of Pitt’s 34,000 students are in Oakland.

Despite the losses, Penn State leaders, including President Neeli Bendapudi, are bullish on the branches. Each embodies the university’s outreach mission as the state’s only land-grant institution, they say.

Not only do their faculty members educate 18- to 22-year-olds and returning adults in communities across the state, the schools are local economic development drivers, cultural mainstays and major employers.

“Yes, we do have some capacity in many campuses for increasing student enrollment, but capacity isn’t the metric,” Schwartz said. “The question is, are we meeting a need? Are we meeting our mission?”

First-generation students make up 37% of the roughly 24,000 who are enrolled in Penn State’s 20 branch campuses, he said. They operate collaboratively through shared programs, staff and courses delivered on multiple campuses.

The campuses also are seeking more out-of-state students.

On the economic front, Penn State’s LaunchBox and Innovation Network, embedded in branch campus towns, offers no-cost assistance to entrepreneurs, innovators and startups.

Schwartz said Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, has invested heavily in nursing and may invest more. Penn State Greater Allegheny has created a bachelor’s program in social work, and Penn State Hazleton is offering computer science.

In New Kensington, the community and nearby campus are collaborating to move the local economy from the Rust Belt into the digital belt, said Kevin Snider, chancellor of Penn State New Kensington.

On Fifth Avenue in downtown New Kensington, the Digital Foundry at New Kensington’s exterior of orange, dark brick and large windows is as attention-grabbing as the robotic arms and other advanced machinery inside.

The 15,000-square-foot venue is a joint effort by the campus, the Economic Growth Connection of Westmoreland County, the city of New Kensington and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, which provided $10 million in funding.

Its state-of-the-art equipment helps small- and medium-sized manufacturers understand and use the latest technology so they can thrive, while providing students in engineering and other majors the skills those employers need to stay in the area.

“Yes, I’m going to use it to recruit students, but think of what we’re doing for the community here,” Snider said. “To me, this is vital to Pennsylvania.”

The place gave Evan Hileman, 20, a rising junior from Murrysville, an early jump preparing for a career working with robots.

“As a freshman, I got to come down here and work with a lot of equipment and different types of automation that I will work with in my future,” the electromechanical engineering technology major said from behind a laptop on the building’s second floor.

Enrollment decline to continue into next decade, expert says

Officials at Pitt-Greensburg declined to be interviewed for this story.

A university statement said Pitt-Greensburg provides “a world-class education that reflects the needs of the region” and that opportunities, jobs and worker training are delivered by it and other Pitt campuses at Bradford, Johnstown and a two-year campus at Titusville, Pitt’s smallest with 23 students.

In 2018, Pitt repurposed Titusville for area workforce needs and now leases space to outside education entities.

Among its efforts to boost enrollment, Pitt has said representatives are “traveling across the commonwealth — 75% of which is rural — to talk to prospective first-generation students about the benefits of a college education,” the statement read.

Nationwide, regional public campuses and smaller, less endowed private colleges remain most vulnerable in the slumping student market, said Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

He and others say, unlike in the past, when a weak economy sent more students to campus, the pandemic-driven economic slump did not. Even now, some who are able to command higher wages in a worker shortage have stayed away.

“So many students went to college because that’s what you did after high school. But that’s not true now,” 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.)

“People are saying, ‘I really don’t need to go to college. I can make just as much money going into the job market,’ ” Wollman added.

Harnisch said Pennsylvania’s demographics may mean its colleges wait longer than other states for a rebound.

“Based on the numbers I’ve seen in Pennsylvania, the enrollment decline is going to continue throughout this decade and into the next,” he said.

The state has another barrier: cost.

Pitt and Penn State are among the nation’s highest-priced public universities, with in-state base tuition at $19,760 and $19,286, respectively. Their branches charge less — $13,568 to $16,824 — but are still almost twice the $7,716 State System tuition.

Those schools are quick to point out that Pennsylvania is ranked 49^th nationally in average taxpayer appropriation per full-time student, at $6,100. The national average is $10,200, according to the State Higher Education Finance Report.

Senate Education Committee Chairman David Argall, R-Schuylkill County, said Pennsylvania’s expanse of public campuses has played an important role, but officials “need to help them adapt” to what may be a new reality.

“People planned dormitories and classrooms and other buildings (years ago) under the assumption that they were going to have X number of students, and today we have much less than X,” he said.

The senator saw up close what that means in 2017 when the Penn State branch where he taught political science as an adjunct professor told him he was no longer needed.

“I was a budget cut,” he said.