News / Education

Armenti’s New Book Proves Act 188’s Promise of High Quality Education at the Lowest Possible Cost to PASSHE Students Has Become an Empty Promise

The 14 PASSHE universities in Pennsylvania include: Bloomsburg, California, Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown, Lock Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West Chester.

Angelo Armenti, Jr., the former Villanova University Dean and 20-year President of California University (Cal U), recently announced the release of his new book, Privatization Without a Plan: A Failure of Leadership in Pennsylvania Public Higher Education.

“The purpose of the 14 PASSHE universities,” according to Act 188*, is "to provide ‘high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students,’” Armenti said. “Unfortunately, the data since 2002 show that under the 100% political control of PASSHE by elected and appointed State officials, that promise to PASSHE’s students, parents and alumni donors has become just another empty political promise.”

Armenti claims that the problem is political but not partisan. “It is political because it involves the governor and other high State officials,” Armenti said. “But it is clearly not partisan because, for the past eleven years, the failure to deliver the promise of Act 188 occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations, beginning with Gov. Rendell and accelerating under Gov. Corbett.”

In his book, Armenti provides graphs of PASSHE data to prove that both ends of PASSHE’s statutory purpose—high quality education and lowest possible cost to the students—have been weakened since 2002. “The data show that PASSHE’s educational quality peaked in 2002, and that half of the quality gains prudently made in PASSHE’s first nineteen years were eroded in PASSHE’s last eleven years.”

Another graph in his book shows that typical financial aid packages across America feature 51% grants and 42% loans while, at a typical PASSHE university, the average package is 27% grants and 55% loans. “Clearly, Pennsylvania is not providing higher education at anything like the lowest possible cost to the students,” Armenti said.

*http://www.passhe.edu/inside/legal/Documents/Act188.pdf.

Privatization Without a Plan: A Failure of Leadership in Pennsylvania Public Higher Education is on sale now, available from Amazon.com in paperback and e-book. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=angelo%20armenti.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Angelo Armenti Jr. served as President of California University of Pennsylvania (Cal U) from 1992 to 2012, Before that, he was a Dean at Villanova University, a professor of physics, and author of The Physics of Sports, Volume 1 (American Institute of Physics, 1992). During his career at Cal U, Armenti is credited with establishing numerous funding sources for scholarships and for campus revitalization projects, efforts that were made in part to address the problems that he describes in Privatization Without a Plan. Now retired, Armenti spends his time advocating for the preservation of public higher education in Pennsylvania and writes for his blog at http://angeloarmenti.blogspot.com/.