As Penn State cuts staffing at its 20 Commonwealth campuses and at least two private colleges in our region sink into financial distress, the people who run those institutions point to shrinking enrollment as the culprit.

But the dwindling number of students - undergraduate enrollment declined 6% nationwide between 2019 and 2023 - is merely a symptom of misplaced priorities and a lack of leadership in higher education.

Even as enrollment declined for a decade, colleges and universities expanded programs and services secondary to their educational mission, bloated the ranks of administrators and built bigger and better non-instructional facilities in the competition to attract students.

To pay for it all, they curtailed tenure so that nearly one-half of college instructors are now part-time employees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and raised tuition to dizzying heights, driving student debt past $1.7 trillion.

Meanwhile, the presidents of the nation’s leading schools make millions per year and the average annual salary for a college president surpasses $200,000, according to the online jobs platform ZipRecruiter.

A study by the Progressive Policy Institute found the nation’s top 50 universities have, on average, one faculty member for every 11 students while employing one non-faculty member for every four students. Three universities, the California Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of California at San Diego have more non-faculty employees than students, the study found.

No wonder tuition, fees, housing and a meal plan will cost a Pennsylvania resident more than $32,000 at Penn State’s main campus this year.

Even a small private college like Keystone College in Wyoming County, which says it will avoid a threatened closure with the help of a yet-to-be-publicly-named investor, costs about $18,000 per year. Clarks Summit University in Lackawanna County, which has temporarily furloughed all employees to close a budget gap this summer, charges nearly $30,000 per year, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Stop-gap measures, like Penn State’s decision to cut staff at its satellite campuses by 10 percent and consolidate administrative positions so that chancellors oversee multiple campuses will only go so far. A reckoning is coming as community colleges and technical schools draw away students with lower tuition and the promise of access to highly paid and highly sought-after trades and specialties

The pressure on non-public colleges would only grow under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposal to combine Pennsylvania’s 10 state-run and 15 community colleges, boost their funding and cap tuition at $1,000 per semester for qualifying middle-income families.

Republicans in the state Senate have resisted Shapiro’s plan, instead offering new state-sponsored scholarships to be used at any Pennsylvania college or university, but targeted toward students in certain “in-demand” occupations such as agriculture, computer science and engineering.

As always, what emerges in the final state budget is likely to look much different from either side’s opening position, but at least each party is focused on reform and innovative solutions.

The willingness to try new approaches will be essential if our institutions of higher learning are to return to their core mission of preparing students for fulfilling lives and careers and stop saddling them with crushing debt that will hang over them for decades.

To achieve that goal, the leaders of those institutions must begin thinking more like educators and less like entrepreneurs.

SCRANTON TIMES-TRIBUNE