Ohio State is ready to take the next step toward a brighter future, with brighter students.
Last week, the Board of Trustees approved a new strategic enrollment plan for 2011-2015, titled “From Excellence to Eminence: The One University Enrollment Plan,” which aims to increase the number of students on all campuses, bring in more out-of-state and international students and increase test scores, ranks and grade point averages of incoming students. Officials estimate the plan will bring in $12 million in additional net revenue for OSU to protect the school if Ohio cuts funding for higher education.
An excerpt from the plan’s preamble promises to fight those possible budget cuts: “As the engine that will drive Ohio State forward in these uncertain economic times, strategic enrollment will be our institution’s unflinching response to that fiscal uncertainty, a response that will allow our institution to enhance its academic reputation and preserve the quality of education that our communities recognize and expect.”
The plan is broken into three steps: quantity, quality and diversity. For the first step, quantity, officials said from 2011-2015, the university will incrementally enroll more freshmen, transfer students and graduate students so that by 2015, the student population across all campuses will be more than 66,000. The university’s population in 2009 was about 63,000.
For the second step, quality, the university wants to improve the academics of incoming freshmen, transfer, graduate and regional campus students. By 2015, university officials would like 60 percent of its incoming freshmen to have graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, 96 percent to have graduated in the top quarter, and all to have an average ACT score of 29, up from this year’s incoming class average of 27.7. The expectations are a far cry from the qualifications of classes years ago, when one just had to be an Ohio resident to get into OSU.
With OSU upping its standards, some might wonder if OSU is choosing to be more elite, or if so many people are applying that it’s becoming easier for the school to accept only the best.
M. Dolan Evanovich, vice president for Strategic Enrollment Planning, said it’s a little bit of both. OSU received 26,000 applicants last year and took 16,000, increasing its acceptance rate to 64.7 percent from the previous year’s 61.8 percent. Although Evanovich said officials will continue to take more talented students, he wouldn’t categorize OSU as “elite.”
“We are becoming competitive and selective,” Evanovich said. “We admitted 61 percent (for this Autumn Quarter). Harvard, Yale … they have acceptance rates of 8, 9 percent. That’s elite.”
Jefferson Blackburn-Smith, senior associate director of Undergraduate Admissions and First Year Experience, agrees with Evanovich.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘elite,'” Blackburn-Smith said. “Nobody wants to change the OSU experience. (The strategic enrollment plan is) about finding more kids that are like the ones already here (at OSU), but are more academically talented.”
Those applying to OSU in recent years have noticed the change in admission standards. Megan Nauman, a third-year in speech and hearing sciences, said she considered OSU a hard school to get into when she applied, although several years ago she said she wouldn’t have considered it that way.
First-year engineering student Tyler Hugenberg had an ACT score of 29 and a GPA of 3.5 but said he was “wait-listed for a day” when he applied.
Blackburn-Smith said the admissions office gets a “significant number” of calls from rejected applicants and their families.
“A lot of times, parents don’t understand the (competitiveness) of OSU, calling to say they know their kid would be successful at OSU,” Blackburn-Smith said. “But we’ve denied a lot of students who could have been successful.”
The final part of the plan calls for increasing diversity among all OSU campuses by bringing more international and out-of-state students and more students of color. For the Columbus campus alone, by 2015, officials hope a quarter of students are from out-of-state and want to increase the amount of international students in incoming freshman class to 8 percent.
To do this, Evanovich said officials plan on using their “geomarkets,” including flagship campuses in other parts of the world. OSU just opened a flagship campus in China, and Evanovich said officials hope to do the same in Brazil and India. Evanovich also said officials will work to offer more scholarships and develop better and more financial aid packages for merit and need-based students.
Evanovich promised that although OSU is trying to become more diverse, academics — not race or residence — will be the most important factor in admittance. An excerpt from the plan echoes his sentiments: “Expanding the student population … must not — and will not — come at the expense of quality or diversity. Indeed, the plan envisions quantity, quality, and diversity as foundational and indivisible components of one Ohio State University, which, as President (E. Gordon) Gee would remind us, strives to be a single-minded institution with world-wide reach.”
Blackburn-Smith said the changes the enrollment plan proposes are for the best.
“We’re a very diverse institution,” Blackburn-Smith said. “We’re not trying to change the character of who comes here. We want it to be better, not different.”
