Pennsylvania has been ranked number 45th out of 50 states on education funding in the country. PA Governor Josh Shapiro has proposed a budget plan for a 15% funding boost for PASSHE (Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) universities. Shapiro also wants to create a new governance system that brings together state universities and community colleges. Shapiro’s plan has raised many questions about how this will work.

I believe that uniting state universities and community colleges is a bad idea. However, adding a 15% raise for funding in PASSHE schools will help out PA’s ranking and hopefully make college more affordable. There has been a need for a boost in funding in higher education for a long time, but merging state universities and community colleges is not the way to go about it. There are certain identities centered around both types of colleges and having to go through an integration can lead to a lot of confusion and make student’s lives more difficult. Not to mention these colleges lose their identities.

For example, take our university, Bloomsburg merging to become Commonwealth University. It is confusing for students as to whether we are keeping our identity as just being Bloomsburg, as the president has previously mentioned, yet there are changes every day that make the “Commonwealth” name takeover. Having to deal with another merger can possibly have all the school’s identities shot down. It would also be very difficult trying to coordinate activities and can be very time-consuming leading to service interruptions.

This has been one of the biggest issues with the merger of CU, and students and faculty have experienced this firsthand. One of the biggest selling points of community colleges is affordability. Adding this big of a percentage in funding is a huge deal for Pennsylvania schools. PA is one of the few states that does not have a state-wide governing board of higher education, which is one of the reasons PA has been struggling in ranking as higher education can be looked over. One of the biggest critiques of higher education is how expensive it is, and lot of families do not want to pay that much for schooling and kids do not want to be in debt for a long period of time.

However, this budget increase is supposed to help with that. Families earning less than $70,000 a year would have their tuition limited to $1,000 a semester. This aspect of the budget plan is great in hindsight, but again as I stated before it is not worth it to go through another merger, especially for a school like Commonwealth that has just undergone integration.