Opinion

By wrecking state universities, GOP crushes American Dream for its own communities | Will Bunch

Pennsylvania's 14 state universities can be a ray of hope amid a battered Rust Belt economy, so why have GOP lawmakers suffocated them?

by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published 2 hours ago

You can’t destroy the American Dream without building it up first. At the dawn of the 1960s, amid a Camelot of post-World War II can-do optimism, Pennsylvania injected academic steroids into old teachers’ colleges in out-of-the-way places like Kutztown or splayed boxy, utilitarian dorms across Appalachian foothills to create an engine meant to propel the Keystone State’s young people into a bold new economy.

These 14 institutions — from West Chester University and the historically Black Cheyney University on the western edge of Philadelphia’s suburbs to Edinboro University some five hours northwest — would become the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, or PASSHE. With low tuition underwritten by taxpayers — who’d reap the benefits of an educated workforce — Pennsylvania would teach the daughters and sons of coal miners, factory workers and farmers to become guidance counselors, or accountants, or business executives.

What could be more simple — or politically popular — than the mission statement of Kutztown University when it upgraded in 1960 from the Keystone State Normal School, to become “a center for learning for the best possible education of the youth of Pennsylvania...” It all seemed impossible to screw up, yet somehow Pennsylvania’s politicians have spent the last couple of generations killing the American Dream of higher education. And they’ve done it with a brutal frog-in-boiling-water technique, slowing heating up the pain, year after year, until suddenly the future of our young people is totally cooked.

Jamie Martin, the current president of the faculty union (the Association of Pennsylvania State College & University Faculties, or APSCUP) at the 14 universities told me this week about how she was able to graduate from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s with no student debt . “You could get on with your life,” she recalled. But today, “we’re seeing students delaying things” — getting married, having kids, buying a house — “because of the size of their loan repayment.”

{snip}

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter

Published May 6, 2021

Will Bunch wbunch@inquirer.com https://www.twitter.com/will_bunch
Will is the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what's happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.