What’s missing from Shapiro’s bold college plan | Will Bunch Newsletter

What do Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Detroit all have in common? They are three, gritty blue-collar cities with epic contributions to our galaxy of pizza, wings, and other heart-attack-provoking food? Well, yes. But they are also home to three NFL teams that I’ve rooted for in January, only to watch crash and burn on national TV. I really need to take up knitting, or some other hobby.

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An “all of the above” strategy is a terrible idea when it comes to energy policy, when one of “the above” — fossil fuels — is wrecking the planet. But “all of the above” thinking is exactly what we need when it comes to finally tackling the crisis of how America tends to abandon its young people right as they enter adulthood.

The nation — and especially the state of Pennsylvania — needs to take dramatic action to fix higher education at a moment when the public’s trust in our colleges and universities is at a record low, and when young Americans are getting crushed by $1.7 trillion in student debt. But we also need job training and opportunities for the millions of youths — 38% of high school grads, here in Pennsylvania — who don’t go to college, at least not right away.

When Democrat Josh Shapiro became governor of Pennsylvania one year ago, it seemed like he only got part of this problem.

His very first action after his 2023 inauguration was an executive order removing any diploma requirement for about 65,000 state government jobs, criticizing the prior rules that penalized talented people who hadn’t attended college as “arbitrary.” Then he allocated $400 million in federal aid for an “unprecedented” job training program. But Shapiro’s first year saw no serious effort to address college affordability in a state that ranks worst in the nation for the most student debt.

But kudos to Shapiro for a sophomore-year plan that finally starts to tackle “the rest of the above.” The bold proposal that the governor plans to formally announce early next month would cap in-state tuition and fees at Pennsylvania’s 10 state-owned universities and 15 community colleges for families making under $70,000 a year at just $1,000. He also seeks a $1,000 boost in state higher-education grants and wants to consolidate the maze of fully public universities and community colleges into one unified system more focused on affordability.

If Shapiro finds the money and gets the legislature to sign off — two gigantic “ifs” — it will right a longstanding wrong in the Keystone State. With not nearly enough public debate, lawmakers in Harrisburg have been starving public universities here for decades, so that today Pennsylvania is second from the bottom in state dollar support. Rather than seeing an educated electorate and a skilled workforce as a public good, our government has dumped the burden for college on struggling families — which is why the average grad leaves campus with more than $40,000 in debt.

In the perfect world, Pennsylvania — and the rest of America — would seek a return to the golden age of U.S. higher education in the 1950s and ‘60s, when tuition was nominal for everyone. In the real world of 2024, Shapiro appears to be pushing for what’s economically and politically feasible, so what’s not to like?

I reached out to an expert on college affordability, Sara Goldrick-Rab, author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, and a senior fellow at Education Northwest, for her thoughts on Shapiro’s proposal. She told me she had serious concerns, especially with a proposed new funding formula for public universities including the four state-supported schools — Penn State, Temple, Pitt, and Lincoln — that aims to promote “workforce development” and uses performance metrics including graduation rate and the number of first-generation students. Goldrick-Rab also raised good questions about why those four flagship schools aren’t brought into a fully public framework and thus made more accountable to Pennsylvania citizens.

There’s always been two big questions looming over college in America: Who pays for it, and — more existentially — what is it really for? Is the mission molding well-rounded and learned citizens with critical thinking skills, or more narrow career training? Shapiro’s laser focus on “workforce development” worries me, because his proposed metrics could be an excuse for Pennsylvania’s college administrators to copy too many of their peers and slash programs in the liberal arts.

The governor’s early rhetoric around his plan reminds me too much of West Virginia University’s controversial president Gordon Gee, who roiled that state’s flagship school with deep cuts and painful layoffs in programs from foreign languages to advanced math that he claimed would better align the school with what employers want.

Aside from crippling student debt, you know what else Pennsylvania leads the nation in? The percentage of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. We should remember that while it’s important to train a skilled workforce, it’s even more important to start producing well-informed, and well-rounded citizens — the kind that come with a true liberal education. I hope that Shapiro — whose election in 2022 was in many ways a rejection of the Big Lie and related conspiracy theories — will acknowledge that the very best college outcome is a stronger democracy.

Question: Can [President Joe] Biden hold Michigan while losing Muslim support? — Via I, Vermectin (@engelr412) on X/Twitter

Answer: The short answer is ... no, he can’t. The crisis for the Democratic incumbent was in the spotlight last week after the president sent his campaign manager to meet local leaders in a state with a large Arab-American population that Biden narrowly won in 2020; many top locals snubbed the president’s Michigan emissary. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, after Biden alienated many Muslim-Americans with his embrace of Israeli right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last fall. But I wouldn’t say all is lost for POTUS 46. Some White House leadership on getting a Gaza ceasefire, ASAP, would still give Biden nearly 10 months to remind voters of Donald Trump’s horrible history on issues that matter to Muslims.

Last week’s question about a proposed third-party presidential campaign backed by the centrist, business-oriented group No Labels drew the biggest response ever, and the verdict was just about unanimous. You hate them! You really, really hate them. Newsletter readers think the only potential outcome from someone like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin running would be to ensure the election of Donald Trump. Regina Simmons said Manchin “is terrible for the environment, and women’s rights. He will cause Trump to win and Trump will turn our system into an authoritarian state.” Denise Mueller agreed: “I wish we could have a vibrant personality and younger Democratic candidate [than Biden] but will vote for democracy and integrity.”

📮This week’s question: President Biden faces a difficult choice over Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of federal authority to control migration on the southern border. Should Biden take an aggressive posture and federalize the Texas National Guard to take down Abbott’s razor-wire barrier, as allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court? Or should the president leave it be — believing that a confrontation would likely help Donald Trump in the fall election? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Border Crisis” in the subject line.

What if the second American Civil War is already underway, and one side didn’t bother to show up? OK, that is not exactly what is happening at Eagle Pass, Texas — the Rio Grande crossing point that’s a magnet for Central American refugees, where Gov. Greg Abbott has massed state troops and put up slashing razor wire in a standoff that has seen a number of migrant drownings. But Abbott’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court — vowing to resist its recent ruling allowing federal agents to cut down the razor wire — ought to be a big story. And it is, but only on conservative media. Even with 25 GOP governors supporting Abbott and some pledging to send their own National Guard, mainstream outlets and President Joe Biden are taking pretty much the same approach to the most serious challenge to federal authority since “massive resistance” to school integration in the 1950s and ‘60s.

They are pretending the situation at Eagle Pass isn’t happening.

A search of the New York Times on Monday night showed the so-called “paper of record” covered the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling on the razor wire on Jan. 22, but has not yet run a single story on the Texas governor refusing to obey it. The Washington Post only ran one article — focused on right-wing conspiracy theories and not the actual crisis — until three separate opinion writers woke up and weighed in on Monday. Coverage on cable TV news wasn’t much better. At the risk of sounding like one of my conservative trolls on X/Twitter, the mainstream media is acting like it’s taking its cue on the story from the Biden White House — which is just hoping this story goes away.

The messaging from the White House is nothing about Eagle Pass and all about Capitol Hill, where Team Biden is on the brink of a good, bad, and ugly border deal with Senate Republicans that is certain to be sabotaged in the House, at the cynical and xenophobic urging of Donald Trump. Team Biden sees the deal as good politics, while the standoff with Abbott is no-win situation. But the longer Biden ignores this, the more it looks like his presidency can be successfully bullied by right-wing extremists. Yet if the president follows the example of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1957 Little Rock school integration crisis and puts the Texas National Guard under federal command, he risks election-year charges that he is actually the real dictator — plus the risk of a military confrontation. One thing is clear: Journalists should not be doing Biden’s bidding in trying to make a constitutional crisis disappear.

Looking back, January 30 might be my absolute busiest date — the list includes pieces from 2020 on how Sen. Bernie Sanders seemed cruising to the Democratic nomination (he wasn’t) and TWO from 2018, including a pan of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. The other 2018 column — slamming the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and its then-chair Marcel Groen for failing to take #MeToo-era charges of sexual harassment seriously — is the one I’m especially proud of. The piece caused then-Gov. Tom Wolf to demand, and get, Groen’s resignation. I wrote that “the truth is that Pennsylvania very recently ranked 49th of the 50 states, ahead of only Mississippi, in electing women to office. The Keystone State has a lot of catching up to do, and so does its state Democratic leadership at a moment where the chorus of #TimesUp will only grow louder.” Read the rest: “Silence makers: Why did Pa. Democratic Party go MIA on sex harassment?”

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