Pennsylvania’s Higher Education Is Not For The Poor

Almost 30 years ago I embarked on the exercise of applying to colleges. I had been preparing for this – having scored well on both the PSAT and the SAT exams; participated in the P.E.P.P. program administered by Penn State; and I was on track to graduate in the top 10% of my graduating class. I figured that between coming from a low-income family and having a solid academic record, financing college would not be a problem.

Boy was I wrong!

What I wasn’t prepared for, what the wake-up call I got from being a poor student in Pennsylvania, trying to go to college. The state ranks near the top of the list in terms of both in-affordability and student debt levels.

The state’s residents spend an average of $55,144 per year on education. This includes in-state tuition and fees for a full-time undergraduate degree, on-campus room and board, books, supplies and other campus expenses.

Esther Wickham – Report says Pennsylvanians face highest costs for colleges

It is true that at the time, I was only considering schools that were out-of-state. Back then, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) only would grant you $600 to attend a college or university out of state. Nowadays, they don’t offer you anything unless you attend an out-of-state school from a short list of reciprocal states. PHEAA offers a few other specialized grant programs; but none cover the full cost of tuition except at the most inexpensive programs (most are capped at around $5K per academic year).

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Pennsylvania Has An Odd Hierarchy For Higher Education

Many people outside of Pennsylvania have no idea that the state’s best known universities are actually not public institutions. They are something that is called ‘state-sponsored’ — meaning that they are not primarily funded by the state.

As the video above presents though, Pennsylvania does have public universities. These are the PA State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) schools. None of these schools are R1-level research universities though and they are often located in rural areas — a result from the fact that many of them started of as normal schools, which focused on theology and teacher education.

2025 was the first year in over a decade that enrollment increased at the PASSHE schools overall — but it was at a meager 0.6%. Full disclaimer, I used to work at one of these schools. And when I left back in 2012, the entire system felt like a car that wasn’t running on all of its cylinders. It’s a terrible outdated system that has many campuses that hemorrhage money. But internal problems aside — it does present the ‘affordable’ option for Pennsylvania residents to get a bachelor’s degree (take IUP for example, which charges $7,994/year in tuition; never mind that this is more expensive that the in-state tuition rate at the University of Florida — which is currently $6,380).

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Let’s jump back to the state-supported schools. What would you pay to attend those? Well let’s see:

If you are a student who lives in a household with an annual income of $50,000/yr, it is quite understandable that looking at these figures will give you some serious anxiety!

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And finally let’s throw community colleges into the mix. When you talk about college affordability, invariably you get those people who say, “Ah, well if you can’t afford college, this is what you do: go to community college for the first 2 years, and then transfer to a 4-year university.” What these people do not understand though (or maybe they just do not care), not everyone has access to a community college. And, those community colleges run the gamut in regards to academic offerings, transferability, etc. And of course, Pennsylvania is messy in this area as well.

Let’s look at some numbers. There are 15 community college systems in PA. However PA has 67 counties so there’s that. Let’s look at this on a map, shall we?

Yikes! I mean, there isn’t even a community college where Penn State is (I stand corrected)– so I have no clue what young people in Forest County do. Anyway, in addition to access, you have this really weird tiered tuition system at community colleges in Pennsylvania. So you have one tuition rate for in-county residents, another for out-of-county residents, and then another for out-of-state residents. And it varies, depending on the community college! So let’s just look at this for one of them, shall we?

So you could be a student in Greene County, enroll in classes at CCAC, and pay just about at much as you would if you went to IUP!

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But let’s bring this back to being poor — and how the college landscape looks in Pennsylvania when you are in this situation. So, working to ‘put yourself through school’ is definitely a thing. When your family is poor, you can’t just call them up and ask them for $100 or $200 to take care of some surprise expense that pops up. So you have to work. And you need a local economy that presents opportunities to do that. I had one sister who went to Edinboro University and another who went to Slippery Rock. Both had a heck of time finding part-time jobs. My one sister found a position at a mall in nearby Erie — but she was limited to working hours where she could get there and back on public transportation. When I was in college a decade prior to them, I always had a car. But cars come with their own set of expenses, and I always brought my cars in cash — something that you can’t really do nowadays (especially if you are poor).

The truth is for a very long time, Pennsylvania legislators just did not care about college affordability and for sure, the didn’t care about how poor students in the state were going to pay for college. This is why Pennsylvania’s college students carry the third highest student loan debt burden in the entire country. This is such a shame, because for a very long time, I felt that it was my fault that my student loan debt was in the stratosphere. But like so many things in life, there is more to it than meets the eye!