It’s a free country. If students feel that they would rather go elsewhere because of “value”, so be it. There are a lot of less expensive options including community colleges they can attend for a cheap education. Apparently many of them still choose PSU over these less expensive options, and the numbers that make that choice are increasing. There are plenty of factors other than cost which obviously factor into choices students and their parents make, and many of us who graduated from PSU are wealthy as a result of our PSU degree, so cost is a non factor fortunately.
It does raise the question of whom the university should be serving, the children of the poor or lower middle class, or the more fortunate among us. I suspect there may be some correlation between the economic strata of the student body and their academic achievement, but those are dicey issues obviously for many reasons I’d rather not get into. I frankly don’t know if the pressure to increase DEI has an impact by admitting more students from lower performing high schools. You get into the whole question of what is the mission of a large State university, and whether that mission is influenced or even eroded by the lack of State financial support to enable the university to behave more like a private school serving a different clientele with different priorities, i.e., international students or out of state students, or even wealthy suburban students students for example. I’m not sure Penn State knows exactly where it fits in this matrix, or perhaps it has decided to try to change from one set of priorities to another?
BTW one of the cost savings which Barron allegedly takes credit for, and I have no way of knowing whether or not it’s true, is that under his leadership, the number of students who graduated in 4 years instead of 4.5 or 5 years increased substantially, and that this in fact lowered the cost of a Penn State degree. Anyone care to refute this?
