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(09-14-2020 12:26 PM)stpnum4 Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 12:11 PM)colohank Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 11:39 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 11:31 AM)geef Wrote:  

(09-14-2020 09:46 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  Money is not the issue. Ohio has about as equitable a funding model as any state in the country. Up until a few years ago, it was literally based solely on a head count. In other words, a student at Ohio's highest ranked and only public AAU university counted for the same amount of state support as one at Shawnee State. Personally, I think that was ludicrous. It would be like California funding Berkeley or UCLA no differently than the most commuter dominated Cal State campus. Today, there are some slight bonuses for retention and graduation rates that OSU clearly benefits from as the state's most selective school, but it doesn't really tilt the scales in their direction in any fundamental manner.

What is the issue is student selectivity and national reputation, and OSU clearly benefits in these two matrix in a way that no other Ohio public can compete with. They have the big time AAU/billion dollar research budget and the cache and reputation that brings in the peer assessment score, and they have an average ACT of 30 and reject half their applicants. Those two factors weigh heavily in the final ranking.

Everyone else being down is just a factor of Ohio having an overbuilt and redundant system where all the other schools not named OSU cannibalize each other. OSU has the endowment, demand from potential students and AAU status to float above the fray. It's why I would like to see a much more structured system that does fund campuses differently based on their roles. Yes, that would mean formally acknowledging OSU's "flagship" status and probably giving them a separate funding model from the rest of the system (which is what they had until the 1960s anyways), but it would also mean separating UC from the rest of the pack in terms of formally recognized role and funding model.

Great explanation. I'd also add that changing demographics exacerbates the cannibalizing. Ohio schools simply cannot be selective because the number of high school graduates has not grown appreciably for years. Compare this to California, for example, where UC schools like Merced, Riverside, and Santa Cruz have shot up the rankings in part because they've suddenly become quite selective. Same holds true for many of the publics in Texas and Florida.....

A few months I was looking at the number of applicants the Florida schools get every year and was floored. It’s not just within the state, they get tens of thousands of applicants every year from kids wanting to escape the weather in the Midwest and East Coast. UCF, USF, FIU, and FAU all accept less than 50% of their applicants because they have so many.

I understand that the Florida publics have some kind of quota system in place to ensure that each school accepts a more representative share of the state's high school grads. What they don't want is for all of the elite kids to gravitate toward the flagship and all of the more average students to end up at the lesser schools. A lot of qualified kids apply to all schools with the assurance that they'll be accepted at one of them, but personal preference plays a minor role.

As regards UC, the drop in ranking is a damned shame. The school needs to strive for greater selectivity. Sports-minded folks complain about Nancy Zimpher, but at least she knew that institutional reputations are built on quality, not quantity.

At UC there is always a tension between aspiring to be a globally/nationally recognized research university and its founding mission of educating the people that make up the Cincinnati region. This is detailed extensively in David Stradling's book "In Service to the City - A History of the University of Cincinnati."

I suspect the drop in US News ranking directly cocorrelates to the significant increase in student population (and thus less selectivity) that the occurred in the last 10 years +. UC has a beautiful campus, but that costs money/debt. I'm not an insider, but its pretty obvious that you need more tuition paying students to service that debt if you are trying to operate a sustainable model.

I have always liked our mission of being a school for first in the family to attend college. That said, would be nice to balance that with being more selective in some way.

Someone else had mentioned us not offering enough to top academic kids. I have never had the feeling that we "OWN THE CITY", and we are AGGRESSIVE as we should be to get as many of the top kids as we can. We should be all over high schools, meeting with Natl Honor Soc students, aggressive with all top 5-10 kids, etc. I am not sure of rules or standards. I am long out of high school, so maybe this is done more than I realize. Maybe someone else can respond.