One thing not mentioned is that this also comes at a time when state institutions are not seeing the same level of support from their state governments that they have in the past either. Some tidbits from a slightly old article linked below:

Forty-six states — all except Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2015-16 school year than they did before the recession

States cut funding deeply after the recession hit. The average state is spending $1,598, or 18 percent, less per student than before the recession.
Per-student funding in nine states — Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina — is down by more than 30 percent since the start of the recession.

In 12 states, per-student funding fell over the last year. Of these, four states — Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Vermont — have cut per-student higher education funding for the last two consecutive years.

In the last year, 38 states increased funding per student. Per-student funding rose $199, or 2.8 percent, nationally.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/fundin...

I've said it here a lot. Ohio grossly overbuilt the system in the 1960s and then told all those new campuses that they were free to start loading up with doctoral and professional programs. It also created a silly redundant system where the 2 year community colleges compete with the in-house "branch campuses" of the 4 year schools.

You do realize that the article is precisely about the problem of having "local" kids, right?

For one, there are fewer of them, so most state schools will inevitably lose enrollment. Perhaps more importantly, they pay a lot less in tuition and the offset for that coming from the state does not compensate for it.

If I were King of the Forest (and possessed a time machine), I'd make the following changes.

No branch campuses. For two year campuses, there'd be one, centrally run community college system.

Out of the bankrupt metropolitan universities, only Cincinnati would have been brought in as a independent four year university. Akron and Toledo would have been combined with BGSU and KSU. If they didn't like it, then let them die off and turn the campuses into community colleges/city colleges.

The Eagleson Act (which allowed only OSU to have Ph.D programs, professional schools, and to conduct research would have been modified but not thrown out the window. It would have been expanded to include a set and defined number of other Ohio public universities relative to Ohio's population and number of four-year universities. Something along the lines of California's Master Plan would have been implemented that separated research universities from colleges from community/city colleges.


Miami's scheming, politicking and games to become the system's only selective university would have been snuffed out before it started. Three universities would have been allowed to have selective admissions (Ohio, OSU and Miami). UC, Toledo-BGSU and KSU-Akron would have marginally selective admissions: i.e. enough to balance certain standards while maintaining access as both commuter schools and safety schools for kids who don't get into OU-OSU-MU. Any other four-year campus would be open admission.

Also, there was opposition from Akron and Kent sports fans who hated each other and couldn't stomach the idea of a combined athletic program. However, such a combined program would probably have been stronger and would have been more cost effective. I wonder how these folks would respond to this kind of merger today.

I realize what the article said. I think it's a garbage article.

The main "problem" I see here is that some people don't feel there is a moral obligation for Ohio University to make it a priority to educate local children.

Ohio University educating more kids from Ohio, wow things are really getting out of hand.

The article is a well-researched and fact-based account of what's happening. If you want to get mad about the lack of support for Ohio kids, talk to your state legislators. Better yet, vote for different ones.

https://www.policymattersohio.org/research-policy/fair-ec...

Out of curiosity, would you support spending the $18M a year that goes towards the athletic subsidy on scholarships for in-state students instead?

I'm going to edit this and expand on it a bit.

Ohio's entire endowment only disburses just over $20M/year to the university. Ohio State just announced that any in-state student who qualified for a Pell Grant would attend tuition free. Now, after Pell Grants and other scholarships are taken into account, OSU estimated that will cost them about $11M/year. So, for probably about half the athletic subsidy, we could be trumpeting in every newspaper in the state, every high school college fair and so on that if you're an Ohio resident from a family that makes less than 60K/year, you can attend Ohio tuition free. Now, if you think that enrolling Ohio residents (a "moral obligation") is the most important issue for Ohio, I'll ask what expenditure do you think best moves Ohio forward?

It does seem as though McDavis is out at the right time and before his reckless spending created an Akron type situation.

It would appear though that, if not a full blown Akron-type crisis, a period of financial retrenchment is certainly at hand, and the trustees and administration are going to need to start making some hard decisions on where best to allocate resources to keep Ohio competitive and moving forward.

What I'm talking about is the university has 626.4 million dollars of outstanding debt according to what is stated in (chapter 7) of the university budget book. By 2021 depending on inflation that number could reach 760 million. For this reason I think there is some caution at the moment for committing to sports & recreation extras. Although, I did see where only 125 million from the latest bond 325 million authorization (page 53) has been allocated so its possible the university could spring for an addition to the Ping Center, Convo ect. in a few years. They like to keep construction businesses in the area working by spreading out the projects over a number of years IMO.

https://www.ohio.edu/sites/default/files/sites/finance/bu...

The last numbers that I saw were around 2014/2015, and they back you up. At that time, looking at the debt to annual budget ration, Ohio was in decent shape at about 1:2, which is about the same as OSU (though OSU sits on a billion dollars in unrestricted cash reserves as a rainy day fund). Cincinnati and Miami were in much worse shape at 1:1 as a result of some drunken sailor spending to position itself for a P5 bid in the case of the former and lure all those University of Illinois rejects from the Chicago suburbs in the case of the latter. Akron was not surprisingly the basket case carrying more than one and a half times their annual budget in debt.

A couple of thoughts. I think anyone should have predicted what happened at OSU. OSU was never a commuter school in the sense that Cincinnati is. Sure, they had a fair amount of Columbus area students simply because they were located in one of the 3 C's, but they always pulled students from all over the state and from out of state. Half the student body seemed to be from Cleveland when I went up there in the late 80s. They were also always a major AAU/Big 10 research university. Jim Rhodes forced them to be open admission from the mid 60s through the mid 80s (which they got around by flunking out 25% of each freshmen class), and when those restrictions were lifted by Celeste and Riffe, what happened afterwards was pretty much inevitable. Public perception often lags the reality on the ground. OSU had pretty much equaled Miami in admissions by 1995 and had clearly surpassed them by the early 2000s, yet today there are Miami alumni that are utterly in disbelief if you tell them that OSU is harder to get into than Miami. Of course, they're the special kind of morons who still reread their yellowed, 30 year old copy of Public Ivies every year.

McDavis liked to talk a big game, and one of his favorite things to say was that Ohio would equal and even surpass OSU in admissions. It was nice red meat for a certain crowd, but it was utterly hollow speechifying. Under McDavis, Ohio's admission stats were stagnant in a time when the demographic trends were favorable. As much as it sickens me to say it, UC is now harder to get into than Ohio, and that's 100% on McDavis. As for catching OSU, it's never going to happen. Their average ACT is just a decimal point under 30, and their median SAT at 1300 (https://mup.asu.edu/sites/default/files/mup-2015-top-amer... ) is the tenth highest in the country for a public university. Miami can't keep up even with scrounging every high school in the Chicago suburbs for Big Ten rejects, so I think it's an unrealistic goal for Ohio to be judging itself against. And I guess that gets me to why I really don't like McDavis. He may have done well in some areas, but at the end of the day, he was a sunshine pumper who made unrealistic promises that he utterly failed to keep.

I'm interested in your thoughts on how Ohio should be marketing itself. Unlike during McDavis' tenure, Nellis doesn't have an expanding pool of Ohio high school graduates. As I asked Optimist, if educating more Ohioans is a "moral obligation" wouldn't our annaul 18M athletic subsidy, or at least a portion of it, be better spent on undergraduate scholarships?