I'm of the opinion that OSU is at the moment relying a lot on the USWNR rankings to attract out-of-state students (2,280 of 7,600) who can't get into a Top 40 rated school. An example family where the parents are living in suburban NJ who both attended private schools, didn't have kids until their mid 30's but now are looking at college. That would put them about 52 meaning they graduated undergraduate in 1988 when graduating from college was still an automatic ticket to the corporate ladder. They were able to get into management with a combined family income of say 200k. Helicopter parents, only 2 kids and willing to spend every last dime on them. The corporate ladder and housing bubble didn't quite work as well for graduates of 2008 or even 1998. They are the last of the of the baby boom white collar economy generation. The 29 ACT average at OSU is a bubble that is going to burst with increasing classes sizes and shifting demographics. Shifting generational dynamics. Unlike OU who has not benefited by the USNWR era of college selections OSU has a lot to lose in a backslide. The same goes for that football team which is riding the sports TV bubble. Bubble bursts and Horseshoe crowds could become as sparse as a Browns game.

So assuming that the state will never mandate open admissions, that brings us to what I take to be your central argument, that it will be some kind of natural bubble bursting. I think OSU's US News ranking helps them, but that's also their worst ranking. I'll leave out Forbes which is utterly ridiculous and literally designed to make public universities look bad. OSU keeps butting their head against the US News top 50 mark but can never crack it. If they were closer to the top 40, I'd put more stock in the argument that it's a primary factor in their admissions successes.

In any event, one of your arguments is actually on OSU's side. The size of their freshmen classes. If the quality of their applicant pool declines, they have the luxury to simply accept less kids. Trim that freshman class back to 6K, and that average ACT jumps to 31 or even 32. And in a bizarre twist, some of the things that OSU fought against in the Rhodes years (namely over-building the system and branch campuses) provides a very convenient outlet for any political blowback over the level of their admissions selectivity. There are many (too many) other options for the kids that OSU doesn't want. When Rhodes ordered that they accept everyone, there was no community college system, no branch campuses and only five four-year public campuses in the state.

Also, OSU does recruit out of state, but they haven't really gone all in on it the way Miami has. Miami literally has billboards all over the Chicago suburbs. OSU has stated that they think around 25% OOS is a healthy number that balances being a national university with being an Ohio public. They have a lot of room to get a lot more aggressive in attracting out of state students if they desire.

The other thing working in OSU's favor is the movement of a very few public universities (Michigan and UVA most notably) in a direction that almost makes them pseudo-private, and that's primarily driven by economics. We've all heard ad nauseam the Miami crowd crowing about how they're more like a private university than an Ohio public university. That's only true in the socio-economic background of their students. With actual regard to how the university operates, it's OSU that is actually achieving that model. Within the next decade, they'll probably cross the threshold where they're seeing more annual income from their endowment than they are from the state of Ohio. Either you have the big dick endowment swinging past your knees or you don't. OSU has the fifth largest public endowment in the country, and it just passed the $5B mark thanks to an energy deal that gave them an immediate $1.1B infusion with no strings attached. And this is the key more than their US News ranking. They have the money for merit aid that very few public universities in the country have. And I think their administration is aware of any upcoming challenges and unfavorable demographic trends because they've pledged to spend the billion dollar windfall primarily on "affordability" issues. The first result of that was the program they enacted similar to what Michigan did, which makes the school tuition-free for any in-state kid who qualifies for a Pell Grant. That's only going to cost them around $11M a year, so it ties up around $200M in endowment funds. That leaves $900M more for them to play with, and I'm certain that a large chunk of that will be devoted to merit aid and OOS student aid.

Thanks for the contribution it was good reading. Some of the countermeasures for OSU you've mentioned like once again constricting freshman class size down to 6,000 students if demand tapers off are possible in theory but really not on the table since they built new dorms to support a larger freshman class size. OSU is too big. Every aspect of it down to the FB stadium. At least with Michigan they have a sunken stadium so it appears from the outside that its 75,000-80,000 seats. I have a woman I work with who said there was no way she was going there, its too big. She ended up going to Columbus St. and sent her daughter to Bowling Green. OSU isn't the type of place that helps you as an undergraduate socially or career wise. Miami can do that for you more as a greek school but it to lacks national cachet. Business school while very good at Miami won't get you into Wall Street. OU with its College of Communications is more nationally connected. Obviously it depends on major somewhat, a couple of fields favor Miami over OU. OSU has money & resources but is an Orwellian place to spend 4 years with everything so large scale. They are still charging those pell grant qualifying families room & board if the tuition is free. Room & Board is now a larger cost than tuition at universities. OU is offering breaks on tuition depending on ACT scores so they'll be able to pick up 27-29 kids at almost free tuition where they'd pay full at OSU. For most college shoppers I do think it starts and ends with board scores as to determining what level a college is and unfortunately OU fell behind in the merit aid era to the point where its difficult to attract top students who want to go to an already 29-30 ACT average school.

I think it's safe to say that any kid scoring 26-29 (much less 30+) on the ACT had to take a college prep curriculum and do at least halfway decent in it. Do they have the GPA and class rank to get into Columbus? Possibly not, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't hit a sweet spot in Athens. As for taking on Miami and OSU head on, that's what Ohio has attempted for decades, and it hasn't worked. I'm not sure tweaking the approach here and there will change outcomes.

Or, Ohio's largest medical school with branch campuses in Dublin and Cleveland, the latter connected with the Cleveland Clinic.

Del, you might be interested to know that OHIO briefly (maybe five years, or so) had a dental school in Cincinnati. I don't recall the details, but somehow we bought, or were gifted, a private dental school, and then ran it for a few years, and graduated maybe 25 or so folks with a DDS degree. It became a financial burden and was closed. I sometimes wondered what kind of overall impact it might have had if OHIO had figured out a way to keep it open. The time period here is circa 1910.

Fascinating stuff OCF! Thanks for sharing. I would definitely be interested in learning more about that.

You may very well be right. Ohio might have been given a window of time to wind down or sell the dental school after Eagleson. The fact that it occurred somewhere around that time, leads me to believe that ending the school and Eagleson are somehow intertwined.

Lotta ifs. Being in a 3-C city certainly would have helped, but a lot more would have needed to happen such as not allowing religious interference in the administration(a big sticking point that was key in blocking both Ohio and Miami from getting the Morrill Act designation) along with securing the things that would later go to OSU such as the land-grant status, the Eagleson Bill protections and being funded under a separate funding bill than the other colleges.