Are these figures for the entire J-school - all 5 sequences? Or just print and/or magazine journalism?

Thanks for clarifying, Alan. I can't say that the decline in enrollment in print journalism is surprising. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that top notch newspapers - NYT, WSJ, LA Times and a few others - are still able to attract excellent journalists.

Are you seriously suggesting that Miami has a socio-economically diverse student body? As I posted earlier, out of the thousands of public colleges in this country, only one (William & Mary) enrolls a lower percentage of Pell Grant students.

Here's some data from a recent (2017) database that the NYT put together.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/som...

School/Category/Students from top 1% income families:
Miami "Selective Public Colleges" 7%, only Oberlin & Denison in Ohio are higher
Ohio "Selective Public Colleges" <1%
OSU "Highly Selective Public Colleges" 2%

Top 10%
Miami 37% (27%)
Ohio 19%
OSU 25%

Top 20%
Miami 54%
Ohio 38%
OSU 46%

Middle 60%
Miami 41.2%
Ohio 55.7%
OSU 49%

Bottom 20%
Miami 4.8%
Ohio 6.3%
OSU 5%

While all three could do better at the bottom, it would certainly seem that Ohio and OSU are doing a significantly better job of enrolling middle class students (and in OSU's case with admission standards higher than Miami's to a degree that the NYT puts them in a different category). And it's not just socio-economic diversity. Dig deeper into it, and it's underrepresented groups, it's first-generation college students, it's political diversity, it's academic diversity (how many Miami students/alums have you ever met that didn't major in either business or eduation?). Miami has the reputation that it does for very solid reasons that have been in place for decades and speak directly to the core of the institution, what it values and how it sees itself.

So yes, increase Ohio's selectivity and up (to a reasonable degree) the percent of out of state students, but I'd argue strongly our model for doing that is in Columbus (or 20 other public campuses) not Oxford.

I'm a generation younger than you, so I only personally have experienced the results of the privileged place in the sytem that Millett and Shriver engineered. Prior to that, everything that I understand about the system backs up your contention that Miami was no different than the other schools.
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Schools before the baby boomers hit were nowhere near as concerned with selectivity as they would become. In this part of the country, it was largely self-selecting. If you couldn't compete in college, why try. Get a union card and a great middle class job out of high school. Even into the 80s, any kid who graduated in the top 50% of his high school class was guaranteed a spot at Wisconsin--Madison, traditionally the second highest regarded public in the Great Lakes. I would argue that, among Great Lakes publics, only Michigan back then was selective in the way we consider it today. Some background that might explain some things and then some conjecture on why Miami became what we know as Miami today.

So, all the schools in the late 50s and early 60s know that the baby boom enrollment bubble is heading their way. Almost all of the Big Ten/AAU schools began to institute managed, selective admissions in response, and OSU was doing the same. And at the very same time, Jim Rhodes appeared. As we've discussed, Rhodes did many good things to grow the system, but he was a mixed bag. He was a populist concerned only with more colleges and more access to them rather than balancing quality into the equation. As someone who flunked out of OSU, he was literally hostile to the notion of quality which he equated with elitism. That's where Shriver and Millett came in and took advantage of Rhodes' populism to convince him that OSU should not be allowed to become "elitist," and it happened in the context of some pretty hard core protest movements at OSU: large free speech movement and protests in 1964, the occupation of their administration building by black students in 1968 and the violent clashes after Kent State in 1970 which shut down the campus. All of these rocked Rhodes' conservative administration and played into Millett's hands to argue that OSU should never be allowed to become "elitist." Let the radicals and troublemakers leave the state. Needless to say, Miami's conservative students weren't engaging in any similar radicalism.

Ohio joined the effort in the belief that Ohio and Miami would become the two "selective" schools that would be allowed to manage the baby boom enrollment. Now, Miami was never officially selective any more than Ohio or OSU or Bowling Green. They simply never requested funds to build more dorms for the increased applications that the first wave of baby boomers were sending in. They backdoored their way into selectivity, and Millett quietly supported and encouraged it. Ohio and OSU, conversely, were allowed no such freedom and were forced to build dorms to handle anyone who applied. And of course that's where my contention lies that Vern Alden made a huge strategic error in siding with Miami only to get stabbed in the back. That's the reality of the history. Miami actually tried to spin out the myth that they were the "designated honors campus" of the system." One of their trustees brought that nonsense to our office in attempting to halt OSU's selective admissions (and Ohio's pending petition to move to selective admissions). We looked it up. There was never any act of the legislature, the Board of Regents or an executive order by any Governor declaring them that. They cooked it up out of thin air, and they actually taught (teach?) it to their students. I've ran into many Miami alums over the years who will use that exact phrase, and refuse to believe that it's a myth.

So by the late 70's Miami is the only selective public college in Ohio, yet it was an unnatural system that wasn't bound to outlive Rhodes' last administration by much. Imagine if Wisconsin had forced the AAU campus in Madison to be open admission while allowing UW-Whitewater to be selective. So how did it end? Since OSU was the school that ended Miami's monopoly on selective admissions (Celeste and Verne Riffe were their patrons in this), I was exposed to their arguments. OSU's engineering and sciences still allowed it to attract a top 20% of the class actually better than Miami's back then. It's just that the open admissions forced them to accept a bottom 20% that Miami didn't have to, and they had the stigma of open admissions. In upending the Rhodes/Millett system, the real golden arrow in their quiver though was top students leaving the state. They had all kinds of data showing that top tier students (top 10% of high school class & 30+ ACT), particularly in engineering and the sciences were leaving the state for other Big Ten schools rather than going to Miami because of the open admissions status of the AAU school. Ohio had the biggest outflow of these students of any state in the region, and OSU hammered that home to the legislature, to the corporate community and to the newspapers. Ohio pretty much waited on the sidelines and then put their own request in several years later. I've heard that this was a combination of hostility on both sides: Ping's personal animosity towards OSU that wouldn't allow him to make a common cause with them along with a political judgment to let them take the risk and see how it played out combined with OSU's lingering hostility and mistrust towards Ohio for siding with Miami in the 60s that led them to go it alone. The end result is that OSU had several years head start on becoming selective and branding themselves within the state as such. Combine that with all the other resources at OSU's disposal, and Ohio was, and continues to, play catch up.

Anyway, that's the background and apologies for my long convoluted way in getting here. So, how did Miami end up as this preppy, conservative "rich kid's school." This is mostly conjecture, but I'd guess that in the 70s Miami's applicant pool became self-selecting for a few reasons. SW Ohio was extremely conservative back then. There was no engineering college and not really strong Arts & Science departments at Miami either to attract an academically diverse student body and slowly there was this self-perpetuating "like attracts like" flow of preppy Greek business majors to the point that Miami would make the Princeton Review's annual list of "Colleges Where Diversity Is Not Valued" right alongside BYU and Texas A&M. As I noted above, kids who didn't fit the Miami type were ending up at OSU, Ohio or leaving the state. I can't say with any certainty, but I can make an educated guess that Miami also made little or no attempts to do anything about it: no outreach to Appalachia or inner city Cleveland or Mechanicsburg. No investing in engineering or STEM, which they're furiously attempting to make up for now. I think their inherent arrogance led them to believe that OSU would never overturn their privileged place. They were arrogant and complacent that they had it all figured out, so they just kept doing what they've been doing since the mid 60s until it was too late. And then when it became clear that they would never be equals with OSU within Ohio, you see the mad rush to Chicago. Well, by the mid to late 90s, Miami is what it is, and if you have a kid in an upper middle class or affluent suburb of Chicago who doesn't get into Illinois or Wisconsin, I think it's natural that the ones who end up at Miami (over say Iowa or Purdue) are going to be the ones who fit in there: the preppy Greek business major. The African-American, the kid who wants to major in History or Aerospace Engineering, the politically liberal are going elsewhere.

Maybe this role and the arrogance behind it is something just hard-wired into their institutional DNA from their role in the antebellum period as a finishing school for wealthy Southerners, and their 20 year period as Ohio's selective school allowed it to awaken like a dormant disease. So here we are half a century after the events that set this all in motion. I would argue, that OSU has become elite but given their diversity and initiatives at affordability for Ohio residents, not elitist. Miami, on the other hand, is not elite as a public university but tries desperately to be elitist with their sky high tuition, fixation on the old public ivy book and turning their back on Ohioans and Ohio taxpayers. That is why--despite whatever historical frictions there have been between Ohio and it--I do respect OSU as a valuable institution in Ohio and can't find any reason to feel the same towards Miami.

Thanks for bearing with my long, rambling dissertation this morning.

Thanks for this, and for your more lengthy treatise above. I thought you did a very thorough job. It seems like "back in my day" may have been an anomalistic period between the antebellum period of being a finishing school for wealthy southerners and the later period of public ivy pretension. Two minor bits of personal detail that might be of some limited interest: 1. My father-in-law was a good friend of Jim Rhodes at OSU, and the two literally flunked out of the school together; my father-in-law, though, did get his act together, enrolled later in Franklin College and graduated from there. 2. My father was the chairman of the Faculty Advisory Council (forerunner of Faculty Senate) during part of the Alden years. He had very few positive things to say about his interactions with Alden. He thought Alden to be primarily interested in enhancing his own reputation and standing, and much less in the long-term interests of Ohio University. Not sure that information adds much to the discussion, but I guess it might explain where I'm coming from a little, and my own personal biases. It's late now, and I must get to bed. Can continue this dialogue later, if there is interest.

Thanks, OCF. One thing I'll point out is that when the Miami trustee approached our office (undoubtedly coordinated with their administration) to assert Miami's faux-historical role as "the designated honors campus for Ohio" he wasn't just sticking his finger in the wind to see if OSU's selective admissions could be rolled back (Celeste was now gone) but also attempting to strangle Ohio's application to move to selectivity before it could be born. So to answer Alan's question of understanding the hate for Miami, combine that with Shriver and Millet's betrayal of Alden in the 60s, and I think there are some solid reasons to hate that school.

Well if president Alden cared more about his reputation than the university he certainly came back to campus many times long after his tenure ended.

Is it all about ACT scores?

For 20 plus years I was a speaker at the annual fall JEA/NSPA conference which averaged 4500 of the best and the brightest journalism students in America. In all of that time, OU showed up one time to exhibit and the guy who came stayed half a day, left his materials on a table and left. Some of the best journalism programs in the country were there including Ball State, Kent State, and the University of Missouri. This sort of strategic outreach will net the types of students that so many are clamoring for.

http://jea.org/wp/home/news-events/national-conventions /

You see far more adds and billboards in SE Ohio for Marshall, Toledo, BGSU, Kent then you ever do for Ohio University. Random TV ads as well. Always been a $64K question

Would agree with this 100%

Unfortunately when they get their turn at the mic, they lose their voice. Very and I mean very few people have the spine to speak up and when they do, they are dismissed as ney sayers, malcontents, or troublemakers. I've seen it for years in parents of school children who were in rotten classrooms. They were afraid to speak up because of what might happen to their kids. Tax payers in Ohio are no different. Few will speak up because of how they will be perceived. Sad, very sad.