Penn State will keep largest commonwealth campuses open, explore closures for others
Penn State will explore closing several of its commonwealth campuses, the university president announced Tuesday, citing declining enrollments, demographic shifts and financial pressures that higher education has been facing.
It has not been determined which campuses will close for sure, Neeli Bendapudi, Penn State’s president, said in a letter to the community Tuesday. Twelve commonwealth campuses are under consideration for closing: Beaver, DuBois, Fayette, Greater Allegheny, Hazleton, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Schuylkill, Shenango, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and York.
The seven largest commonwealth campuses — Abington, Altoona, Behrend, Berks, Brandywine, Harrisburg and Lehigh Valley, as well as the graduate education-focused campus at Great Valley — will remain open and Penn State will continue to invest in them, Bendapudi said. These campuses have about 75% of the total commonwealth campus enrollments and 67% of the campus faculty and staff.
Margo DelliCarpini, vice president for commonwealth campuses and executive chancellor, Tracy Langkilde, interim executive vice president and provost, and Michael Wade Smith, senior vice president and chief of staff, will co-lead a group that will give Bendapudi a final recommendation of which remaining campuses should close. That recommendation will come no later than the end of the semester. She expects to make a final decision before the spring commencement. If the timeline needs to be adjusted to make the best decisions, they will do so.
The special-mission campuses (Penn State Dickinson Law, the College of Medicine and the Pennsylvania College of Technology) are not part of this process and will continue to operate as they are, she said.
Many campuses have seen steep enrollment decreases and the counties in which the campuses are located are expected to see a population decline in the next 30 years, Bendapudi wrote.
“It has become clear that we cannot sustain a viable Commonwealth Campus ecosystem without closing some campuses,” she said.
No campuses would close before the end of the 2026-27 academic year, and Penn State will continue to extend offers and admit new students for Fall 2025 at commonwealth campuses.
“We have exhausted reasonable alternatives to maintain the current number of campuses. We now must move forward with a structure that is sustainable, one that allows our strongest campuses — where we can provide our students with the best opportunities for success and engagement — to thrive, while we make difficult but necessary decisions about others,” Bendapudi wrote.
There is no specific number of campuses that Bendapudi wants to see closed, she said in a phone interview with the Centre Daily Times Tuesday.
“I just want us to have a robust commonwealth campus system that is sustainable and thriving well into the future,” she said.
Opportunities for faculty and staff reassignment within Penn State will be explored, Bendapudi said, and a “clear and well-supported academic pathway” will be provided to ensure all students can complete their degrees at Penn State, either at another campus or online.
Rumors of potential campus closure have been circulating for a while, which some professors have said is contributing to extremely low morale and high stress levels. Bendapudi said change is difficult and she is “deeply empathetic” to that uncertainty. When the board of trustees asked her to look into this, she said it is about ensuring Penn State is successful in its mission for the long term.
The university has considered what to do with the campuses for a while, she said.
“We will put our people first and be very thoughtful. But a big message that I’m hoping our students do see, and families and faculty and staff do see, is that the campuses we have talked about, we need to make more investments in and build to what is the right size for us, where every campus, every student, gets the best Penn State experience, or robust Penn State experience. And we cannot do that in our current state,” Bendapudi told the CDT.
It’s important that Penn State acts now, “from a position of strength,” she said.
“We want to be in charge of our own destiny and that’s what we are trying to do. And we’ve made a deep commitment to our students, they come first, and our highest priority is supporting our students to graduation and beyond,” she said during the phone interview.
In her letter, Bendapudi said some are concerned that this is just “phase one” of ongoing cuts or restructuring, but that is not her intention.
“We recognize that no campus can thrive without sufficient support. That is why, once we finalize decisions, we will do so with the intent of preserving a thriving, sustainable Commonwealth Campus ecosystem — one that meets the needs of today’s students and remains robust for the next 100 years,” her letter states.
Penn State has 19 commonwealth campuses in addition to University Park and the future of the campus system has been in question for some time. Last year, the university offered a buyout program at the campuses, which resulted in an overall 10% reduction in personnel, implemented a regional leadership model that has many commonwealth campuses being led by one administration, and leaned more heavily into shared services among campuses. More recently, Penn State’s budget allocations for the fiscal year 2026-27 shows funding for commonwealth campuses will be cut by about 7%, or about $25 million.
Until now, Bendapudi and other university leadership have not given clear answers to if campus closures are planned, even when directly asked by lawmakers. When asked directly during a faculty senate meeting last month, leadership also didn’t give a direct answer about the future of the commonwealth campus system.
DelliCarpini acknowledged in that faculty senate meeting the “very challenging times” that not only Penn State is experiencing, but higher education as a whole. She said enrollment is something the commonwealth campuses continue to struggle with, and student success and experience is the “guiding light” used to make decisions for the future.
She previously said the current campus ecosystem is not sustainable in how it is currently operating.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 12:22 PM.
