Thanks for posting. As I've said repeatedly and in this article we admit it, we have been getting out sold. This is a well written article.


As enrollment declined, university leaders pointed to declining numbers of Ohio high school graduates as one of the reasons. For example, at a retreat last August to discuss the university’s enrollment and budget issues, the board was presented with a chart showing a sharp decline in Ohio high school graduates beginning about a decade ago and continuing through 2020 before starting to level off.

But that decline did not in fact happen. The alarming projections by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education were wrong, at least so far in Ohio. And so, declining enrollment at Ohio University was not the result of a shrinking pool of Ohio high school graduates.

Data from the Ohio Department of Education, which gets its numbers directly from the state’s high schools, show that the number of high school graduates has held fairly steady over the past decade. The data show 123,414 graduates in the 2018-19 school year, the most recent year for which data is available because of the time it takes to collect and compile the information. This was just a few students shy of the 123,437 graduates in the 2009-10 school year. In the years in between, the number of graduates did dip in the 2013-14 and the 2014-15 school years but then climbed back up.

“Complaining about enrollment declines is a form of hazing”
—Jenny Hall Jones, probably—

CEASE AND DESIST

Are we aiming for more students or a better quality of students? Which do you believe to be the priority of the current administration?

The short-term goal should be to get bodies on campus as a revenue builder. Improving the quality of students is more a long-term goal, five to ten years.

Is it just a coincidence that the enrollment decline has occurred at the same time that Ohio has lost its party school image? We didn't make Princeton's list this year, but Dayton did. Not on the BestColleges.com top 15 party schools. We're only #13 in the Niche list (Fiami is #16). Schools like Wisconsin, Tulane and Alabama are making top five of these lists. Does not being viewed as a party school anymore hurt enrollment?

Very interesting thoughts. Let me add two more possible contributors- the hazing death and the multi-part front page series in the Dispatch about it and the current fight between the faculty senate and the board of trustees over a faculty sexual harrassment and tenure revocation case.

I'd love to sit on the pato at Jacki O's taproom with a few folks on here and discuss this.

And,what happens if measurable objectives, etc. aren't met ?

It seems ,in higher academics,the people who come up with the items you reference don't face any kind of penalties if goals they set aren't met.

That's interesting news about the demographics that I hadn't heard. It certainly puts more of a burden on the current administration for our enrollment problems, though it doesn't absolve the previous one for showing little to no quality increases during a demographic bubble.

As for measurable goals, I think most universities have strategic plans and benchmark universities that they judge themselves against. I just don't see a lot of accountability for failing to meet them. In the case of McDavis, he continually covered up his stagnation on the quality front by publicly throwing out the red meat in speeches and interviews about how Ohio would soon be passing OSU for freshman selectivity.

Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, now Jake Paul. If you are an OU alum, male, and famous there's a shockingly high percentage chance you're going to be accused of sexual assault.

Late sixties or early seventies would correlate exactly with the period where Miami's image as "the only selective school in Ohio" would have been solidified. Technically, they were open admission like everyone else. The difference was that the chair of the board of regents was a former Miami President who maneuvered them into selective admissions by deliberately not building enough dorms to handle the baby boom enrollment surge in the mid to late 60s. Rhodes went along with it--his primary higher ed goals were turning OSU into a 100K open admission university and building a college in every corner of the state--and the rest is history. That image probably fueled a surge in more affluent and conservative students. By the time I was in college, Miami was absolutely a place to go if you were a preppy, Greek business major and wanted to be surrounded by other preppy, Greek business majors.

I think the snobbery/elitist aspect is insecurity. My feelings in dealing with them is that a large percentage of Miami students try to get into actual highly selective/elite schools and are turned down. They then spend the rest of their lives trying to convince everyone else that Miami is the kind of school they couldn't get into.

Going back to OCF's point, Miami had something in 1970 that OU did not - graduation. 70 - 71 marked the high water mark in erollment with the low in 75 - 76.

https://www.ohio.edu/instres/factbook/FACTENRL_HIST.HTML

Rhodes always said publicly that he voluntarily left OSU to help out his family. When he decided to run again in 1974, The Plain Dealer ended up getting his transcripts leaked to them showing that he was dismissed for academic reasons. It's long been rumored that the OSU administration themselves leaked the doc.

As for Miami's myth making, they used to--not sure if they still do--tell their students that they were the "designated honors campus" for the state system. I know this to be complete b.s. because I lost a weekend of my life researching it for my boss in the state Senate. This was a few years after OSU had gone to official selective admissions, and one of the Miami trustees was quietly lobbying our office to have the state reverse OSU's selective admissions (they saw the writing on the wall), and one of the things he brought up was the "honors campus" nonsense. Well, it was a pure myth that they had made up. There was never any act of the legislature, no policy of the Regents nor any executive order by any Governor declaring them that. It was purely self-aggrandizing b.s. that they made up about themselves out of thin air. In fact the only historical record by the state establishing any campus as separate and above the rest were the ones (Eagleson Bill, early state funding models etc) relating to OSU.