Ohio State officials including President Karen A. Holbrook are anxiously watching Gov. Bob Taft as he makes decisions about state funding for higher education, which could lead to tuition hikes or program cuts for OSU.
Education funding is a thorn in the side of officials at public universities — especially in Ohio, which is well below the national average in the amount of funding set aside for state colleges.
Taft’s newly announced Commission on Higher Education and the Economy, formed to improve Ohio’s colleges by increasing efficiency, will examine the issue — and Holbrook is paying close attention.
“If we had an open slate of things I would like to see happen, obviously we would like to see the state invest more in higher education,” Holbrook said. “That’s the easy answer I would like to give, but there’s a reality I recognize that is not just taking place in Ohio. It’s in every state in the nation, and that is we’re all going to be facing serious budget cuts for education.”
Holbrook said she is confident that with Taft’s emphasis on improving the state school systems, the situation will get better, not worse.
“I do think we have a governor that understands the value of education, so I will keep my optimistic self going forward in hopes that maybe in the future we will see a greater increase (in state funding),” Holbrook said.
If Taft’s commission is successful in its research, the quality of state universities could increase even without an increase in state funding.
In his inauguration speech, Taft made it clear what he wanted this group to recommend — how to improve the quality of the higher education system, increase efficiency, eliminate unnecessary duplication of courses, broaden the use of technology and suggest how it can most effectively support the state’s economy.
Also, the commission will examine which state programs are no longer important enough to continue to receive a good share of state funding.
With Ohio serving as home to more public law schools than any other state and more publicly-funded medical schools than every state except Texas, Taft said he wants to explore the possibility of cutting some unnecessary graduate programs. The idea is that with fewer programs to fund, each school would receive a larger amount of money.
Although the concept sounds logical, it would not necessarily solve any problems, Holbrook said.
“It’s hard to say,” she said, when asked if cutting programs would be beneficial. “You can stick your neck out and say something, but without knowing what the budgets are for those schools and how they drive the economy, who they’re producing and what the payback is, you can’t make a blanket statement without looking at all of those circumstances surrounding each one of those schools.”
If state funding does not improve in the near future, the one way to keep the school running at its desired level is to continue increasing tuition. Other public schools across the state have already acted on this option for the upcoming year.
Last week, the University of Akron announced a 9.9 percent raise in tuition, effective this fall. The raise was approved largely because the state appears once again to be leaning toward cutting higher education funding.
“This action is a direct response to continued actions by the state to cut the budgets for colleges and universities,” Luis Proenza, president of Akron, said in a statement released last week.
Holbrook acknowledged raising tuition is not an ideal solution, but she said it might be necessary considering the goals OSU has set for itself academically.
“As we get more expensive, as our standards go higher and higher, we are excluding a certain part of the population … but students have access to other state universities, and that’s terribly important,” Holbrook said.
“So as Ohio State becomes less available, either by standards or affordability to students, it doesn’t deny them a college education. There are other places they can go, and then if they go there for a period of time they always have the option of coming back and finishing their degree at Ohio State,” she said.
She added OSU is not located just in Columbus — regional campuses across the state are cheaper and offer an alternative site to get an education.
Students who attend those regional campuses for a couple of years before transferring to the main campus take part in a process Holbrook said can be vastly improved, especially with regard to the duplication of courses Taft is so intent on eliminating.
“One thing we definitely need to look at is our connection between community colleges, two-year schools and our four-year schools, so that when students finish a two-year program and then decide to come to Ohio State, they don’t have to take the same courses again because someone doesn’t think the community college course was of appropriate quality,” Holbrook said.
“That’s a place I think we can really eliminate a lot of redundancy and increase efficiency — in streamlining the transition for students to enter our four-year schools,” she said.
As of now, the future only holds question marks. The transition process may improve, but nothing will likely change until the commission begins its investigation.
Holbrook said she is optimistic that, as a group with the sole purpose of examining the situation, the commission will find a realistic solution before tuition rises again.
