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Ohio is trying out a new plan for state universities: privatize them. According to an article by Cliff Peale in the Cincinnati Enquirer:
The University of Cincinnati will be a prime candidate to capitalize on a new plan that would exempt Ohio’s public universities from dozens of state regulations.
The blueprint for “Enterprise Universities,” if approved by the Ohio General Assembly, would be the biggest revolution in Ohio public higher education since Gov. Jim Rhodes’ campus-building binge of the 1960s and 1970s.
Basically the new plan would give Ohio’s state schools more freedom to control university property, avoid state regulations, and charge higher tuition.
According to Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Jim Petro, the “enterprise universities” plan includes “granting more and more independence in return for actual benefit such as lower cost to the universities and more affordability to Ohio students and residents.”
It’s hard to see how the reform will make college more affordable to Ohio students, since one of the most attractive features of the plan, as far as the schools are concerned, is the ability to charge different fees for different programs. That will almost certainly mean charging students more.
Still, Ohio colleges protest that they have few alternatives. This reform plan grew not out of any desire to improve access or cut cost, but simply from reduced state funding. If the schools get less money from the state, they reasonably surmise, they should have the right to eschew state regulations and charge higher tuition.
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PQuincy on August 12, 2011 7:35 AM:
Ohio is merely trying to join the bandwagon of states that have stopped funding their flagship public universities. The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor pioneered this approach, bringing in nearly half out-of-state undergrads and using the out-of-state tuition to maintain a high brand value, academically and in entertaining the students. More recently, the University of Virginia at Charlottesville went there (now less than 10% public funding), and UC Berkeley is busy raising it's out-of-state student proportions so that it can maintain the very high quality of its programs, since the state of California has reneged on its agreements and is violating its own laws by not funding its universities any more.
But with the usual brilliant insight of Republican privatizers, Ohio is going to use this tactic with most of its public university system, it seems. That's right: students are going to flock from out of state, paying nearly as much as private university tuition, to go to the University of Cincinnati and Bowling Green. Good luck.