STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Nearly 150 years after an act of Congress led to the establishment of the first land-grant universities, many of the public institutions face fiscal challenges amid tightening state budgets across the country.
The questions are similar to those facing companies or organizations in other fields as the economy struggles to rebound from the recession, the most pressing issue being how to do more with less.
The future of public higher education will be a prominent topic this week during a conference at Penn State intended in part to get a head start on the milestone anniversary of the establishment of land-grant institutions.
The president of the Washington-based Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, M. Peter McPherson, is among those who plan to attend the event, which begins Wednesday night.
“In a world of many changes and less resources, the touchstone has to be the quality of an education,” McPherson said in a recent phone interview. “The challenge is how we do that, and that will involve some change by us as well as some significant resources from the state and federal government.”
Congress passed the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1862 to encourage colleges to add engineering, mining, agriculture and other applied sciences to courses that were rooted in arts and letters, according to historical information from Penn State. It was thought that the subjects would be useful for a country entering a period of economic and industrial growth.
Each state was given an allotment of federal land, about 30,000 acres for each senator and representative in Congress. The states were to sell the land to use the proceeds to create endowments, which in turn would provide support for colleges that introduced the new curricula.
