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The Pennsylvania State Police has removed college credit requirements for cadets, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Monday, with the hope of opening up state police careers to a wider pool of candidates and alleviating the slowdown in applicants the agency is seeing.
Shapiro, along with State Police Commissioner Col. Christopher Paris and other PSP leaders, announced the change effective immediately at a press conference at the state police academy in Hershey.
“For nearly 30 years, college credit requirements have prevented some of the most capable and committed from being able to serve our commonwealth,” Shapiro said, and that “we all agree that this flexibility will allow us to recruit more well-qualified applicants.”
Until Monday, those wishing to become state troopers had to have 60 college credits — some of which could be waived with previous law enforcement or military experience — before entering the academy, Paris said.
With the removal of that requirement, applicants will still need a high school diploma or equivalent, be between the ages of 21 and 40 at the time they start the academy, and be able to pass a rigorous background check and physical and mental examinations.
Both Shapiro and Paris expressed confidence that the state police academy will continue to turn out quality officers even without the college requirement, which they said has often just served as an unnecessary barrier to entry.
“I do not expect to see a drop-off in the ability or caliber of those who go on to successfully graduate from our training academy and become troopers,” Paris said.
The academy is a 28-week course and has been continually expanded, Paris said, most recently with the addition of de-escalation training that takes the process to over 1,300 hours. All aspiring state troopers, even those with prior law enforcement experience, go through the academy.
Monday’s change for the PSP is part of a broader effort by Shapiro to ease up on college requirements for state employees in deference to practical skills and ability.
One of Shapiro’s first acts immediately upon taking office earlier this year was to eliminate hard college requirements from those executive branch positions that still had them and to emphasize experience in lieu of a degree for other state job postings.
Making college requirements the focus of job offerings “knocked people out from even beginning the process,” Shapiro said, and his office has seen “anecdotal evidence, positively, that people with the skills that we want working in government are now applying, whereas they didn’t before.”
“We’re seeing reason to believe that without these credit or degree requirements we’re going to get a broader range of people applying, and that’s a good thing for the commonwealth and of course a good thing for the state police,” Shapiro continued.
The PSP has been warning that its applicant pool is thinning. Shapiro said that the agency has seen just 1,800 applicants for this year’s academy classes; as recently as 2019, that number was around 8,000.
The 2023-24 state budget funds 384 new troopers coming through the academy, which is expected to fill existing vacancies as well as those immediately upcoming due to retirements.
The state police force is capped at 4,740 troopers by legislative fiat, but Paris and PSP leadership said at a budget hearing in March that roughly 800 troopers are eligible for retirement this year. That number is expected to grow to 1,300 by 2026 — meaning the PSP may soon be facing major turnover pressures.
Paris said in March that the drop in applicants might be due in part to younger people being less interested in jobs that take years to pay off in terms of pensions and other benefits — although he also stressed Monday that base salaries for troopers are now up to $66,911 annually.
Paris and Shapiro also pointed to what Paris described as issues with the “operating environment,” particularly with the recent headline-grabbing line-of-duty deaths of PSP troopers and other officers in Pennsylvania.
Shapiro reiterated his often-used line that “policing is a noble profession” and that a key component of recruiting is that officers “need to know you’re going to have their back.”
The PSP provides law enforcement on state highways throughout the commonwealth, and is also the primary police agency for municipalities that don’t have their own department. The agency also provides specialized functions for local police, such as forensics, tactical teams, and other services.
Graduates of the academy typically spend at least three years on the road as a patrol trooper before becoming eligible to move into specialized roles, Paris said.
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