State-owned universities to recruit former students who never completed degrees

If you’re one of the 130,000 people who obtained credit at one of the state system’s colleges but never finished your degree, you’ll be hearing from the university soon.

Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education will be rolling out a program reconnecting and recruiting former students who didn’t complete their degree to return to college.

“Students who are in this category, they tend to be a little bit older, probably working, may have families, so they’re not the same as the traditional 18-year-olds who are coming to live on a campus or commute to a campus and have a campus experience,” Chancellor Christopher Fiorentino told TribLive.

“These students have different needs, different constraints on their lives, so they may need to attend in the evening, or weekends, or online. We’re ramping up a new initiative to focus on recruiting these students back, because to the extent that they are interested in expanding their credentials, improving their job opportunities, their income potential, we want to be there as a provider for that.”

The initiative comes at a time where colleges nationwide are preparing for a demographic cliff of students, with declining birth rates leading to fewer high school graduates.

This fall, however, the state schools reported a 0.6% enrollment increase systemwide, and an 81% retention rate, a record since system data began in 2004.

“We’re focusing on reaching all of these other groups of potential students out there, working adults who have some college credit but no degree, or even those who have never had the opportunity to pursue higher education,” said Cynthia Shapira, chair of the PASSHE Board of Governors, during Thursday’s meeting.

Shapira said those initiatives go beyond increasing enrollment numbers and strengthening the system financially.

“It’s also critically important because this is the pipeline of population that will be the workforce for Pennsylvania and one that can embrace technology and innovation and lifelong learning, and the understanding that higher education is not a one and done in four years,” Shapira said. “It’s a lifelong process, especially if we’re going to maintain a commonwealth that is among the top states in the country for economic development.”

PASSHE is also in the early stages of developing a course-sharing initiative, where students can enroll in courses offered by other state system universities while remaining at their home campus.

Commonly shared courses include languages, physics and social work, Fiorentino said. Nearly 100 students have participated in a pilot program this fall, Fiorentino said, and the system plans to grow the program by next fall.

“We feel we can leverage the multiple universities within the system to provide opportunities for students, to make sure as we deal with some of the demographic changes, that we’re still in a position to provide opportunities for our students to participate in an array of academic programs,” he said.