What if Pa. just stopped funding universities?

ONE OF THE biggest advantages of doing an exclusive face-to-face monthly show with Gov. Corbett is that you never know what he might say. My interview with him last week was no exception.

Corbett, like Eagles head coach Andy Reid, has a reputation for saying little to the media. I find him to be very direct in my show with him. He used our first show together to make front-page news in the Inquirer when he told me about the Marcellus Shale companies and the impact fees, and the structure under which they would pay.

Corbett also told me that even with the big issues of Marcellus Shale and the possible privatization of the liquor stores, education and educational choice would be the biggest items on his agenda.

So, it was no surprise that I started off this month's show with questions about SB1 - a bill allowing for vouchers for poor kids in bad schools - which recently passed the state Senate. Corbett talked about the need to make schools not about the needs of teachers and administrators, but about the needs of the children they are supposed to serve.

This view of Gov. Corbett led me to talk about higher education and the fact that a recent survey said that Pennsylvania had the third-highest cost for attending our public universities in the country. We discussed that this would be spun to attack Corbett for the cutbacks he imposed on schools like Penn State when he took office.

Of course, I connected our discussion to the ongoing complaints from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Philadelphia about the crushing student debt that college graduates have run up while not being able to find a decent-paying job. I also connected President Obama's intervention this past week in trying to deal with the student-debt issue.

This all led to my asking Corbett why he thought that the cost of college was so expensive. A study by the Heritage Foundation noted that since 1982 college costs have exceeded the explosion in the percentage of health-care-cost increases. It's just one more reason why parents need to avoid a heart attack.

The costs of Big College are getting bigger in Pennsylvania and at campuses across the country. According to FinAid.org, a site that tracks student financial aid, college costs are increasing at the stunning rate of $171,180 a minute and will hit $1 trillion in 2012. College loans are the country's second-largest source of debt.

Corbett told me he believes that runaway college costs can be attributed to two major factors. He said, "Two things: Building buildings - building a lot of buildings; and salaries - what are the salaries?"

He continued: "I think that's one of the things we need to look at. How are you managing your money? Do you need to build a new building all the time?" Corbett singled out Temple University as a school that was making difficult choices in examining its budget. He also talked about Penn State not willing to even consider cutting 4 percent of its over-$4-billion-a-year budget.

All this was just a prelude to the really big idea that the governor volunteered. He told me, "There is a school of thought there that we shouldn't fund the schools at all. This is going to blow everybody's mind - we should fund the students." That's certainly a different and unique approach.

He fleshed out this idea by saying that we could "do our own Pennsylvania education bill. Take all the money that we would send to all those schools, put it in one package and give it to Pennsylvania students to go to Pennsylvania schools - and they can attend any school. It can be a private school; it could be a state school. It could also be a technical school, because we need more people in the trades, more people in the technical area."

My reaction was: Did he just say that? Imagine that the customers for Pennsylvania schools trying to get state subsidies would not be a few hundred politicians but, rather, the students and their parents who would consider Pennsylvania schools. Don't you think that this would help to cut costs and force schools to really compete for students?

Maybe choice seats at Penn State home football games wouldn't drive subsidies. Maybe these colleges would more fully join the market economy. Maybe by capping the number of credit hours for which these student scholarships could be used at colleges might graduate students in a more timely fashion.

Stay tuned for more ideas like this from Gov. Corbett. I'd love to hear the response of Big College.