Editorial: PASSHE tuition decision is common sense

On Thursday, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education acknowledged something.

It’s possible that things don’t always cost the same everywhere.

PASSHE’s Board of Governors voted to let individual members of the state university system evaluate their own costs and set their own tuition.

It might seem that maintaining control over all 14 of the public schools in the system would be best. Let’s make them uniform. Let’s make sure that when you walk into Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you get exactly the same bang for your buck that you get stepping into the hallowed halls of West Chester University.

But college isn’t a fast-food franchise. Nothing really costs the same at IUP as it does at West Chester, and it’s time we stop pretending that it does.

The old joke about Pennsylvania being Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other and Alabama in the middle is kind of right when it comes to economics. The cost of living in the corners is a lot different than the rural areas in between.

Let’s take West Chester. The school is in Chester County, which has the highest median household income in Pennsylvania at $96,656. Only 3.6 percent of residents live below the poverty line. The median home value is $355,000.

Lock Haven University is in Clinton County. That’s among the lowest median household incomes in the state at $47,990, less than half of Chester’s. Home prices are also less than half of those Chester houses.

Why would tuition cost the same?

How much do the instructors have to earn to afford to live there? What about the administrators and the support staff? What about the janitors and food service employees? Saying that it costs as much to go to IUP as it does to West Chester makes as much sense as equating it to UCLA or Harvard’s sticker price.

Trying to average the costs of a college operating in an expensive cost-of-living area with those of one that’s more affordable means somebody might be getting less than they need and someone else could be priced out of being able to attend an affordable local school.

But let’s not focus on how long it took government and higher education to find a common sense solution. Let’s just be glad they gave it the old college try — and maybe hope common sense is contagious.