The state of Pennsylvania’s university system is bracing for further cuts, to counter declining enrollments and state budget slashes.

Inside Higher Ed’s Ry Rivard has the details:

…In the last few years, the universities have shed 5 percent of their permanent work force and discontinued or frozen new enrollment to 198 academic programs. But that wasn’t enough to shore up their budgets. Now universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education are looking to end programs, lay off dozens of full-time faculty members, and cut ties with numerous adjuncts and more staffers.

The 110,000-student system is coming to terms with budget and demographic pressures that are at once familiar to public colleges across the country and unique to Pennsylvania.

Clarion University President Karen Whitney, who made a career studying higher ed finance and administration, now watches as empty-handed lawmakers leave institutions to fend increasingly for themselves, while she is the one handing out pink slips.

“There was this really great commitment to being all things to all people as an agent of the state,” Whitney said, referring to the era after World War II and Sputnik when lawmakers ramped up investments in higher ed. “But I think what we’re seeing now going forward as a new normal in higher education is to stop that, to no longer be all things to all people and — based on an institution’s mission — narrowing our focus.”

For Clarion, “narrowing” means shedding programs in music education, French and German and furloughing 10 of the university’s 244 faculty members by summer 2015, while reassigning others and leaving some vacancies unfilled.

PASSHE, as the Pennsylvania system is known, is no stranger to belt-tightening. But now year after year of wearying cuts are reaching new levels.

The cuts are threatening offerings at the system’s regional state universities designed to provide a well-rounded education for a population of students who are not looking – or aren’t able – to travel far to go to college. About 90 percent of students at PASSHE institutions are Pennsylvanians and the vast majority made the PASSHE institution they attend their first choice, according to system documents. (PASSHE does not encompass Pennsylvania’s “state related” universities, which include Lincoln, Pennsylvania State and Temple Universities as well as the University of Pittsburgh.)