To Avoid Program Closures, PASSHE Explores Course Sharing

For many colleges, financial woes often result in layoffs and academic program cuts, especially for those with low enrollments.

But Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, which has faced years of declining enrollment, announced a plan Monday aimed at avoiding those hardships: PASSHE is pursuing a course-sharing initiative designed to expand students’ access to specialized courses across its 10 campuses at a low cost.

At full scale, system leaders say the plan will allow a student enrolled at a PASSHE campus that doesn’t offer a course they’re interested in—say, in special education—to take the course remotely from another campus and earn full credit, rather than lose out or travel hours to attend in person.

But realizing the full scale of that vision is still years off and will be shaped by the program’s pilot, set to launch in fall 2026. The pilot program will start by sharing foreign language courses across all 10 universities, as well as a few history courses at a small number of campuses and a Deaf education program shared between two institutions. What happens with those will inform when and how the pilot expands.

While some of these courses may already be offered in online formats, others will need to adapt their delivery. For instance, students who are interested in taking a course offered at a different institution may report to a classroom at their home campus and remotely join their professor and other classmates in real time. PASSHE will spend the next year fine-tuning the technical logistics of delivering its shared courses.

To be sure, PASSHE is not the only higher education system to explore course sharing as a way to boost cost savings, retention and access. The University of Hawai‘i and University of Missouri systems have already implemented models similar to the one PASSHE has in the works. And hundreds of other colleges and universities across the country participate in course-sharing networks, such as the Online Course Exchange of Independent Colleges and Universities, the Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas, and the Appalachian College Association.

PASSHE’s entry into the world of course sharing is the latest effort by the system to rightsize its budget in the face of the state’s “demographic cliff”; between the 2019–20 and 2024–25 academic years, enrollment dropped nearly 14 percent, from 95,782 to 82,509, though it started to level off last year.

“We’ve lost a lot of enrollments, done a lot of analysis, and the data shows that the overwhelming percentage of students are graduating in about half of our programs,” Christopher Fiorentino, PASSHE’s chancellor, told Inside Higher Ed. “We have lots of other programs students are interested in, but with the enrollment declines it becomes harder and harder to maintain the variety of low-enrollment programs.”

Across the country, falling college enrollments and more recent federal funding cuts have forced institutions to make tough decisions about how many academic programs they can afford to offer. This spring alone, Portland Community College, Jacksonville University and the University of Toledo announced plans to close numerous academic programs, mostly in the liberal arts and humanities.

But PASSHE sees course sharing as a way to avoid forcing a campus to shut down established academic programs with lower enrollments—such as economics, history and philosophy—without giving students other options to pursue those fields of study. “Rather than just eliminate a low-enrollment program, we’re looking at opportunities both at the program and the course level to link the campuses and enable them to work together,” Fiorentino said.

The course-sharing plan also offers a potential remedy for program voids, especially in rural areas, created by Pennsylvania’s shrinking higher education landscape.

Pennsylvania has the fourth-highest number of colleges of any state, after California, Texas and New York, but falling enrollments over the past 15 years have prompted campus consolidation plans. A few years ago, PASSHE merged six of its campuses into two multicampus institutions. A wave of other colleges in the state, including Clarks Summit University, Pittsburgh Technical College, the six-campus Triangle Tech system and the University of the Arts, all announced closures last year. And in May of this year, the Penn State Board of Trustees voted to close seven of its 19 Commonwealth Campuses over the next two years.

Tech Support Needed

But it’s not just lower-enrollment majors and courses that stand to benefit from course sharing—it’s in-demand career fields with a shortage of qualified workers. For example, although education has the second-highest enrollment of any major within the PASSHE system, the Deaf education pilot slated to launch in 2026 is designed to respond to a statewide shortage of teachers certified to educate hearing-impaired students.

“We’re trying to be thoughtful about how we can preserve opportunities for students and faculty by continuing these programs,” Fiorentino said. “One of the concerns that’s always raised by faculty is that if we’re going to do course sharing, we have [to have] the technology available to support it.”

PASSHE will focus on building that expertise and infrastructure this year, ahead of the pilot’s launch.

Already, more than 500 faculty members have completed training from the Association of College and University Educators to refine both their online and in-person teaching skills. And on Monday, the system announced that a $536,000 grant awarded to the PASSHE Foundation will allow 165 faculty members to spend the next year learning the best practices for delivering the course-sharing model.

Jeff Ruth, chair of the Department of Modern Languages, Philosophy and Religion at East Stroudsburg University, who will lead the foreign language pilot, said it’s an opportunity to leverage the PASSHE language departments’ 20-plus years of experience offering online education. Course sharing will “allow us to experiment with some new approaches, reaching more students than before,” Ruth said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “Competency in language and culture is a skillset that all our students deserve to acquire, and I hope our course sharing pilots might connect more students with courses that bring about that competency.”

PASSHE is also developing a centralized student information platform across all campuses, which will allow students across the system to select their classes, track their grades and manage financial aid, tuition and scholarships. It’s already in place at several of the campuses, and full implementation is expected next year.

“A few years ago, we didn’t have that capability,” Fiorentino said. “As a system, we have a lot of flexibility to transfer the credits from one institution to another and offer the widest range of opportunities to our students.”

Ruth Johnston, vice president of consulting for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, said in an email that such a platform also has some cost-saving potential. “Most universities have their own course management systems and by offering shared courses there may be better centralization of the platforms, which would reduce costs by using fewer or one.”