(12-01-2016 08:51 PM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote: (12-01-2016 02:15 PM)BearcatMan Wrote: The worst thing that's happening in Ohio's Higher Education system is not the lack of oversight or the lack of limitation, it's the fact that our Private Schools are getting increasingly desperate and making moves that negatively impact all institutions. Cedarville, for instance, just opened a Pharmacy School. In doing so, they added yet another option for pharmacy students, thus draining even more students from established programs (such as Cincinnati, Ohio State, Toledo, and Ohio Northern...all top 60 schools) which then in turn requires those schools to lower their admission requirements, giving us a less skilled student, and in turn worker, population all because an obsolete institution feels that it will help them add 10-15 students at $50,000 a pop. The fact that we have 64 institutions in Ohio is ludicrous enough even without schools that have no real reason to exist doing things like that.
Do you think Cedarville is poaching students away from UC or OSU? The USN&WR ranking that I found on the web had OSU at #6 and UC at #33 (surprised at that as I always thought UC was top 20 or better). In any event, are students really being lured away from nationally known programs at UC and OSU to a no-name? Not a rhetorical question at all. I honestly have no idea and would like your thoughts.
There are a few things to unpack there, so I'll go at it in a few different ways:
1) There isn't a single thing an in-state school can do to cause a net loss or "steal" students from OSU because of their insane recharge rate on main campus from both their branch campuses (addressed earlier) and the out of state recruitment and marketing. They have 3-4 hours of national marketing EVERY Saturday in the fall and most weekdays, which does have an incredible impact as we have seen in the last few years due to the Orange and Sugar Bowl years.
2) It isn't about actually stealing students, it's about the
threat of stealing those students. I said before on this thread that competition in Higher Education actually makes things worse (the Charter School debate is laughable to me for this very reason...and I'm in those Charter Schools and see exactly what that breeds). There are two ways to combat that threat for a University, either increase the discount rate (increasing scholarship programs) or decreasing admission criteria to increase the amount of students in their funnel. Both have negative impacts for very different reasons and I'l use a couple of different examples here.
The discount rate has caused budgetary constraints at schools like Toledo (who is close to a 50% discount rate...meaning a student only pays half of the intended cost per year) who provide strong programs, but can't beat the student marketing outreach of schools like Cincinnati and Ohio State, effectively making their selling card affordability even though they offer a strong program. Now that is starting to ring truer to today's students, primarily because they are starting to realize that not having debt is way more important that a ranking of a degree unless you're looking to dig very deeply into research after graduation. Most students know now that completing an in-demand major will likely mean there is a job waiting for you (and pharmacy job prospects show that to be truly), so they don't see the need to spend more money to get to the same end result. Now what that actually does to a school, though, is cause them to hit a net negative per student because they're starting to operate at a cost per student higher than what they're receiving through student tuition and state funding...which is something you're seeing at a lot of the "smaller" publics in Ohio (UT, BGSU, KSU, Akron).
You alluded to the direct impact of what happens when minimums are dropped to make yourself more attractive to more students. In the past few years, Cincinnati's Pharmacy requirements have peaked and actually started to go down...which produces a lower quality student. As the average incoming student becomes less qualified, the rankings of departments, then colleges, then Universities tends to drop precipitously. In this case, their ranking has dropped around 15 spots in the last 8-10 years. If you look at a lot of the
college rankings at UC, they have leveled off or started to drop a bit...part of that is because they've had to start becoming more competitive and they refuse to increase their discount rate, instead favoring a more lenient admission criteria for some majors and colleges. Now on the outside, this looks good, because they can claim increased enrollment and manipulate numbers to make it seem like you've got a more academically qualified class due in large part to the strength of the enrollment profile of the engineering students coming in buoying the overall rankings. However, the deeper you look, it starts to hit home in other areas.
3) The last major point is how this translates to other colleges/majors as well. I mentioned before how more schools are jumping into the Engineering game, and you referred to the over-saturation of Law Schools in Ohio. You're seeing the prior point start to affect that by allowing more students to get into those programs who shouldn't be (I just saw a student with a 149 on the LSAT (39th percentile) get admitted to Capital University's Law School this past week...), which in turn will affect the industry as a whole. The debt bubble with Law School has already made it to the national media, but it's a real problem. If you have to drop your requirements to keep things afloat, you're producing more graduates than an industry needs and putting a massive financial burden on all of them. In my opinion, it is irresponsible for educational leadership to do that to students, which is why playing with established minimum requirements only has a negative impact in my eyes. This over-saturation has to stop, it's coming home to roost and no one is noticing it...when it hits the forefront it'll be far too late.
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