No frills? We grew up in the no frills industry: Pennsylvania's Proposal for a Stripped-down 4 year College

So PA's State Board of Education has suggested creating a "no-frills" four-year college - no dorms, no sports, gyms or other amenities. A no-brainer in a state where it's exceedingly expensive to earn a college degree (and student indebtedness is sky high, and post-baccalaureate salaries are proportionately low), or even in general for that matter and it appears the proposal has been well received. I applaud the model. I damn well should, what with my having been living and working it for the past three years at Peirce. I am amazed at the extent to which preliminary description resembles nothing so much as Peirce: accelerated, year-round, no-frills, low cost four-year programs. At around $1400 per 3-credit class at the time of writing, maybe Peirce fails to count as low cost in terms of cost to the student. (We surely are not competing with the ~$100 per credit hour community college territory.) But the cost from a fully loaded public finance perspective, given that Peirce receives essentially no public support beyond the financial aid its students receives and had what I believe is a very modest default rate, is a regular steal relative to the alternatives, I 'd wager to guess.

Why not just let community colleges offer four-year degrees like Florida does? Well, that may well have to do with the fact that community colleges have a pretty bad track record in terms of many relevant outcomes - persistence, retention, graduation, baccalaureate completion, etc. Seeing how a no-frills four year system is unlikely to be a bastion of the best and brightest, such a system seems likely to draw from more or less the same candidate pool as community colleges and to run up against the same struggles and disappointments as well. Maybe PAs community colleges are collectively sufficiently flawed as to be unfit to form the basis for a no-frill four-year system, I don't know. (They are insufficiently geographically diffuse to serve as well as we should expect, either in their current capacity or that proposed. That much is clear).

What is crystal clear is that this no-frills, four-year (or as I've come to call it, NiFFY, because it makes me think of the jackknife niffy that haunts the children's book classic The Ice Cream Cone Coot) spells increased competition for Peirce. The tuition point at which a state-supported NiFFY is likely to emerge is going to be tough to beat, but its likely to bring all the community college baggage, and while it'll be cheap to students, its full cost to all constituencies may not be such a bargain, frills or no.