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Dave Larsen writes about higher education.Home > Blogs > On Campus > Archives > 2008 > March > 27
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Master Plan for colleges to be released Monday
I’m sure the state’s colleges and universities are anxiously awaiting to hear how the 10-year master plan for the University System of Ohio is going to dramatically change their plans in the next few years. I know I am. I’ve been covering this for 9 months. I’m sure the staff of the board of regents, who are working until 2 a.m. some nights this week editing the thing, can’t wait either. One of the staff members said he was dreaming about the thing in his sleep. Definitely working too hard. I hear V-8 juice is the secret antidote to getting through a long work day.
Details of the long-awaited 10-year master plan for Ohio’s public colleges and universities will be released by Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut on Monday, March 31, his office said today. Fingerhut plans to release the 100-page plan online early Monday morning. That’s right, 100 pages. Pretty meaty stuff, I hear. I’ll have details here on the blog about 7 a.m. Better grab some V-8 juice.
Speaking of education reform: Before you read more on this, head over to my colleague Scott Elliott’s blog to read about a potentially controversial list of reform ideas from Gov. Ted Strickland’s office for the state’s K-12 system that Dayton Daily obtained today. One idea on the list: Eliminating the Ohio Graduation Test.
Monday is the deadline for Fingerhut to submit the plan to Gov. Strickland, who ordered Fingerhut last summer to devise a statewide plan to add 230,000 students in the next 10 years to increase the number of Ohioans who earn degrees, diplomas and certificates to help stimulate Ohio’s economy.
The statewide master plan for the University System of Ohio, drafted by Fingerhut over the last nine months, will lay out a road map for the state’s institutions to do that. The bulk of enrollment growth in both two- and four-year colleges is expected to come from the adult work force.
Making it easier for those students to attend college by providing more flexibility, helping them pay for it by asking their employers to foot the bill, and dealing with a needier population are goals for the master plan.
But such an influx of nontraditional students will create challenges for Ohio’s 23 community colleges and those four-year universities whose incoming freshman often are first-generation college students. Ohio has 13 public four-year universities, including Wright State University, Miami University and Central State University in the Dayton region.
Remedial courses at community colleges are expected to swell as adults head back to college during a time when slightly more than one-third of Ohio’s recent high school graduates who go on to college are already enrolling in remedial math, according to board of regents data.
Some of the unanswered questions college officials and trustees have concern how the increased enrollment will be financially supported when state funding for institutions is not expected to increase. College officials have also speculated how the master plan will enable potential students to earn degrees from institutions outside of their communities.
Also, lot of campuses are not clear about what their “Center of Excellence” is expected to be. Some are worried that duplicative programs will be expected to get stripped out of their curriculum.
But hey, all the speculating can stop Monday. You can find it at the University System of Ohio website. But if you don’t feel like reading 100 pages of material, I’ll summarize it here.
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