October 11, 2017
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice
Students walk along Temple University's Liacouras Walk.
If Harrisburg can't end the budget impasse, Temple University students from Pennsylvania may see their in-state tuition discount go by the wayside, the school's president warned.
Richard M. Englert penned an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer this week in which he urged the state House of Representatives to come up with a plan to balance the stalled state budget.
A state-related university, the North Philadelphia school receives $150 million from Pennsylvania each year, Englert said.
"These funds are vitally needed to help keep tuition as low as possible for Pennsylvania students," Englert said, adding that the impasse threatens those appropriations.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced last week that he plans to balance part of the budget on his own by borrowing $1.25 billion against profits from the state Liquor Control Board. But speculation abounds that about $600 million in annual funding for Pennsylvania's four state-related schools – Temple, the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University and Lincoln University – would be in jeopardy under that plan.
At Temple, 22,000 in-state students pay $12,000 less per year than the school's out-of-state students. That will end unless the state legislature acts, Englert said.
"Like any business, we could not simply swallow a loss of this size without making drastic decisions," he wrote of the North Philadelphia university "Without our state appropriation, this in-state discount — which Pennsylvania families have depended on for decades — would be over, and student debt would increase dramatically."
Read Englert's op-ed in full here.
