These colleges are looking for lifeboats on the deck of the SS Higher Ed Bubble. Here’s wishing them lots of luck.

Ry Rivard of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Pulling Out in Pennsylvania?

Several Pennsylvania public colleges are looking for a way out of the state’s struggling 14-university system.

Supporters say a bill proposed this month would strengthen the state’s higher education system by allowing its best institutions to leave, while critics worry the bill would hurt the system, lead to higher tuition and weaken faculty and staff unions.

Trustees and lawmakers representing three relatively healthy universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education began a public push for the bill last week after working for months to quietly come up with the plan.

Even one of the bill’s sponsors doubts it will pass in its current form. But the end game, supporters said, is to eventually make broad changes to PASSHE, as the Pennsylvania system is known. The bill’s bipartisan co-sponsors have variously called the state system a train wreck and a house of cards on the verge of collapse.

The bill would allow PASSHE’s best-off institutions – those with more than 7,000 students and good financials – to leave the system and become “state-related” rather than state-owned institutions.

Supporters cited the financial benefits for PASSHE of exiting universities paying the system back for some of the value of the public land they use, though those payments would happen gradually over 30 years. Critics include Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett, who called the plan “a mistake,” and PASSHE itself.

The epicenter of support is at West Chester University, a growing university 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican State Senator Tommy Tomlinson, is a West Chester trustee. The university’s foundation even hired a PR firm to lobby for the bill.