EBENSBURG —
Starting with the spring semester, students at Pennsylvania Highlands Community College will see a small reduction in their tuition that will mean a $60-a-year savings for full-time students.
At a meeting this week, the college’s board of trustees approved the reduction, which amounts to $1 per credit in the tuition and $1 off the services fees.
The board was able to make the reduction because the state Legislature, when adopting the state budget, restored a 4 percent cut in funding to community colleges.
The 4 percent reduction had been proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett.
The college trustees had approved a budget that reflected the 4 percent cut proposed by the governor, said Walter Asonevich, Penn Highlands president.
Asonevich said that some community colleges are using the higher-than-anticipated allocations to fund deficit budgets. Penn Highlands’ budget was a break-even spending plan that did not dip into cash reserves, Asonevich said.
“We felt it was better to hand the money back to the students than use it in other ways,” he said.
Penn Highlands has about 950 full-time students and 450 part-time students.
The board also decided to reduce the per credit rate for summer remediation/development courses to $39 per credit from $96 per credit, starting next summer.
The courses are designed for incoming students who lack preparation for college courses, Asonevich said.
Noting that Penn Highlands accepts any student who has a high school diploma, he said the college had found that about 40 percent of the students need the remediation/development courses.
The community college now offers classes at four locations and will be opening a Blair County site by the fall of 2013.
The board expects to be negotiating a lease with a property owner in Blair County within a month.
Currently, the college offers classes at its main campus in Richland Township and at locations in the Hills Shopping Plaza near Ebensburg, Georgian Place in Somerset and in Huntington Township, Huntingdon County.
Asonevich told the board that the national Chronicle of Higher Education in its 2012 almanac reported that Penn Highlands has the highest graduation rate among the 14 community colleges in Pennsylvania.
The graduation rate at Penn Highlands is 31.6 percent for full-time freshmen who obtain their associate degree within three years.
Graduation rates for other community colleges in Pennsylvania range from 6.5 percent to 20.7 percent, Asonevich said.
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