The July 9 Board of Governors meeting was streamed via YouTube. Watch APSCUF President Dr. Kenneth M. Mash’s comments in the video below or read the transcript in this post.
Good morning, Chair Shapira, chancellor, governors, presidents, and guests. My name is Ken Mash, and I’m the statewide president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, which represents the faculty and coaches at our 10 universities.
Given what transpired here yesterday, there’s certainly a lot to talk about, but it does seem to me that there’s a bright red line that runs through all the discussion, whether it be about tuition, three-year degrees, scholarships, the financial health of our universities, etc. And that bright red line is the chronic bipartisan underfunding of our State System. And that’s not just true about our System. It’s true about public higher education generally in the Commonwealth. And those who work at Third and State streets need to be educated about what is actually happening in our System, what is going on at the universities. They need to understand exactly what is at risk for the students of this Commonwealth.
I don’t think that there is a very good understanding because I think very often we go in and we talk about the bright things, the bright pictures, and everything, and that’s good PR generally. But when it comes to talking to people in their offices, getting them to understand, we need them to know the real challenges that our universities are facing — and because of that the challenges that our students are facing.
I do want to talk specifically about three-year degrees. I’ve talked here before about three-year degrees. I was just saying that the great musician Elvis Costello in a song called “Red Shoes” at one point said, “I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.” That’s generally true of the attitude I try to take to things nowadays, given everything that’s going on. But occasionally there’s an issue that hits you close to home. I wasn’t really sure why this three-year degree conversation was one that was really kind of hitting me in the core, hitting me in the gut. Why was it that this issue caused such a visceral reaction in me? And I think after contemplating it for a while that the reason is that I think back to being a first-generation college student from a working-class family that was worried about paying the bills, that was worried even at that time about affording college and sending me to college. And I remember sitting at that kitchen table, and I remember all the advice that was out there: “You can go to this university. (And they went to see my guidance counselor.) You can go to this one, you can go to that one, you could work it out, you could pay it out over time.” And I remember my parents, who worked so hard, looking at me and saying, “You can go here because that’s the college we can afford. That’s just it.” And they believed you go to college, you go to college. It didn’t really make a difference what college you went to. It was out there. And I just imagine these conversations that could happen at those kitchen tables today. Right? Here’s a three-year degree. Right? That’s what we can afford: the three-year degree. Not “Is it good?” Not “Will it be the best?” Because frankly, people just don’t know. When you are a first-generation college student, you have no clue. The only thing you have to go on is the reputations of the institutions. And when you put your name on a degree, you are standing behind it and saying that it is everything that we say it is.
And I think you made the comment yesterday, calling it baccalaureate — bachelor’s degrees in plain language — you’re going to go get your B.A. or your B.S.
Two weeks ago, the American Association of University Professors and AFT put out a statement in response to some actions that were being taken to approve three-year degrees. But I read in part that “(three-year degrees) threatens academic integrity by substituting for a comprehensive education a stripped-down curriculum that prioritizes speed over essential intellectual development. This move may initially create the illusion of reducing costs, but it ignores the root causes of skyrocketing higher education tuition.”
And they go on to talk about the underfunding in the states of higher education and also the need to fund properly Pell grants and TRIO and other programs that are going on. Now, I do believe that most people who support three-year degrees are doing so out of concern for cost and believe that they’re doing what is best for students out of real concern. I just think that reducing the number of years in college is not the solution.
First, if there’s a demand from students and the business community for reduced-credit degrees, why don’t we just create a separate degree that is a reduced-credit degree? We can call it whatever. A junior bachelor’s? Maybe that’s a little too condescending. But some other name for the degree that says exactly what it is but doesn’t try and pretend that these two things are equivalent. Are we worried about — and this is the sense that I’ve gotten in the past — that we’re worried about the amount of work that would be required to do so, that there would be additional paperwork, that we’d have to maybe go to the legislature, then we may have to go to other institutions to get approval for those degrees. But, OK. Do that. Let’s be honest in what we are doing. It’s worth the time and the effort to maintain integrity and honesty. If it’s not that, the only other thing I can think of is that institutions are banking on the confusion it will create.
Make no mistake, once you put an institution’s name on a degree, like I said, the average person will assume that they are equivalent. And it’s not. But the confusion will be there.
Speaking of demand from businesses, are we certain that that demand will always be there? Are we certain that some won’t catch on and suddenly say, “Hey, we want as a requirement for these positions a 120-credit baccalaureate.” Are we sure that that won’t happen? Then what happens to our students, if that occurs? They’re out in the cold. Do we say, “Oops, sorry we experimented with your life?” Now some try to dismiss critics of these degrees by saying that we’re caught up in old thinking, this is the new way of looking at things, and we have to get on board. But I’d say in response that there are a few things older than trying to sell someone a pig in a poke, of promising one thing and delivering yet another thing. Promising a full-quality degree, but actually offering something that’s short of that. The skills that employers consistently say that they want and what they need are the soft skills: critical thinking, the ability to relate to others, being able to work in groups, being able to appreciate different types of problem-solving.
And, yeah, we only require a certain number of GE credits and a certain number of majors, and there’s other credits that you could take, but those are filled with courses that are teaching you different approaches to problem-solving, different ways of thinking about the world. That’s what you get in college, and that’s what you should get with a bachelor’s degree. And it is that that has made the American higher-education system the envy of the world. I was privileged to be able to travel to China several times for the university with the East Stroudsburg delegation, and I can tell you they were very jealous of the type of education that we provided because it was just different at its core as far as what the expectations were, what the liberal-arts aspects of it were, what the free thinking was.
Now, even at your previous board workshop, you brought in a speaker from some consulting group to discuss the future of higher education. In the first half of the speech, she was lauding three-year degrees as the future and that it was something you had to get on board with in order to make it happening. Then in the second part of this speech, when discussing AI, she started discussing the need for the soft skills that students should have to be competitive in a world that is being overcome with AI. Did nobody else recognize the contradiction that existed there when we start talking about three-year degrees? Now the newspapers are filled with stories from those who are involved in AI — Sam Altman and other people talking about how students in fact need those soft skills. In fact, recently John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, told Fortune magazine that double majoring will be the key, and that was something he had learned from Charlie Munger some time before and that it was even more relevant today. Double majoring so you have different ways of looking at the world and different options. And here we are actually talking about reducing the amount of education that we provide. Further, if you talk to my colleagues in an honest conversation, they will tell you that too many students that we are admitting are underprepared for the college experience. Well, if they’re underprepared coming in, and we’re telling them you only have to be here for three years, how are they ever going to be ultimately prepared for their future? And it really strikes me — and this I think goes to the first thing I talked about — as eye-opening: When we saw the list of the institutions that were involved with offering three-year degrees, notably absent from that list — any elite university, any Research 1 university, any university that looks at itself with pride. They’re not jumping on this bandwagon. And I can’t help but see the hidden discrimination of this conversation. The universities that are talking the most about this are universities that tend to serve first-generation students, students of color, and rural communities. The universities that move students into the middle class. I can’t help but wonder why it’s OK to offer these less-than degrees to these students but not to the other students that are there.
Last, a word about last-dollar scholarships. For 10 years now, my colleagues and I have been working on the Pennsylvania Promise. We have worked on it without any help from the State System. From a few people, we faced even some scorn and hostility about the idea of the Pennsylvania Promise. That bill provides a last-dollar scholarship that is paid for by the Commonwealth. The sponsors are Jordan Harris and Vince Hughes. And the bill passed the House for the first time a couple of weeks ago with bipartisan support. The last-dollar scholarship that’s being proposed here would be paid for by the universities. The last-dollar scholarship proposed by the Pennsylvania Promise is paid for by the Commonwealth. It’s time for the Commonwealth to stand up for its students. And I certainly urge all students, parents, faculty, and everyone to get in touch with their legislators and to fight for the Pennsylvania Promise.
Thank you very much for your time.