The old saw tells us you can lead a horse to water. You just can’t make it drink.
It’s not about farm animals. It’s about effort and outcome being two different things. No matter how hard we try, there are no guarantees.
Just ask the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, the body that operates the public universities that dot the landscape. (Not the state-related ones, though: Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln are in a different category.)
The state system can give you a variation on this theme: You can lead a student to campus, but you can’t make them enroll.
The system tried to address this concern by taking California, Clarion and Edinboro and stitching them together, rebranding as Pennsylvania Western University — PennWest.
The move had merit, but PennWest isn’t showing positive results.
Even with the consolidation, enrollment dropped by 4,800 students last year alone, creating a $63 million gap in expected tuition revenue.
This isn’t something the merger created. Enrollment at the three campuses has been dropping for years. This is a continuation of that pattern.
It was that decline the state system was trying to solve — the water where the state system was trying to lure the horses. The numbers show just how few people are drinking.
Julie Wollman, who served as president of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania from 2012 to 2016, put it plainly: “What PASSHE tried to do was save money without closing campuses, and that’s really hard to do.”
It didn’t work.
Now the goal is to try other changes. As this school year ends, PennWest is moving forward with plans to cut majors and minors and add professional certifications at all three campuses — four, if you count the Global Online campus.
The cuts are intended to respond to trends, cutting minors by one-third. At the same time, certificate programs will almost double.
Critics say program elimination will only make enrollment worse, especially as the school reaches out to prospective applicants.
Avoiding hard choices until you are forced to confront them is, again, not exclusive to PennWest. Colleges across the state and around the country are facing uncomfortable truths. This isn’t about failure. It’s about changing demographics and a renewed emphasis on non-college career pathways.
But it does require new ways of thinking and accepting changed realities.
The state system and PennWest have tried to lead. Students didn’t follow. Now it’s higher education’s turn to let the numbers lead to a new pool of decisions.
But no one can make them take a drink.
