Enrollment declines forcing Ohio colleges to look at cuts, closures
COLUMBUS — Ohio’s higher education system, once a source of optimism and confidence in the future, now faces declining enrollment, high costs and crushing debt.
Just in Northeast Ohio in recent months, Lakeland Community College is near a financial crisis, according to state auditors. Cleveland State and Baldwin Wallace universities are cutting jobs. And Notre Dame College is closing after 102 years.
Those schools and other colleges and universities across Ohio are contending with many of the same challenges that their counterparts around the country face. Population isn’t growing as fast as in previous gener- ations, and fewer people are going to college. After a half century of growth, Ohio’s higher education institutions finally are facing the realities of contraction.
This is starkly different from the early 1960s, when Jim Rhodes said on the gubernatorial campaign trail that he wanted a public college or university within 30 miles of every Ohioan.
“We have only just crossed the threshold of the golden age of science,” Rhodes said in a 1962 campaign speech outlining his Blueprint for Brain Power. “...We need brainpower to continue these magnificent advances. We need brainpower to solve the new problems which they present. And we need to ever lead and never follow.”
After the Republican won the office in 1963, new schools opened: Cleveland State in 1964, followed by Wright State in Dayton in 1967, Northeast Ohio Medi- cal University in Rootstown in 1973 and Shawnee State in Portsmouth in 1985. Numerous regional branch cam- puses and community col- leges also sprung up. The boom has given Ohio 14 pub- lic universities, 23 commu- nity colleges, about 50 inde- pendent, nonprofit private schools and roughly 30 for- profit schools.
Today, though, the opti- mism and confidence has been blunted.
The problems facing Ohio’s public and private schools don’t appear to be tempo- rary setbacks or anomalies of the coronavirus pandemic — especially the enrollment trend, which is reflective of Ohio’s demographics.
Enrollment growth has slowed or contracted — depending on the school — thanks to more modest state population growth, fewer students opting to attend college when considering the debt loads they’d have to take on, the state’s popu- lation skewing older and not of childbearing age, Ohio- ans of childbearing age having fewer children, among other factors.
“It’s not any different for Ohio, really, than it is nation- ally,” said Mike Duffey, chan- cellor of the Ohio Depart- ment of Higher Education. “We saw a decline from 2012 to 2020 of about 12% in the public sector — both in the four-year and the two-year... And what this relies on is fundamental demographics, declining birth rates nationally in the United States and in Ohio, but also declining college-going rates. Fewer students are choosing to go to college after high school.”
A look at enrollment
When Rhodes shared his vision for Ohio’s higher education system in 1962, an estimated 70,000 students attended public colleges and universities. That fig- ure was expected to push past 130,000 in 1970.
Fast forward five decades: There were 463,000 stu- dents in Ohio public univer- sities in 2022, according to figures maintained by the Ohio Department of Higher Education.
Yet this was a 12.2% decrease from a decade earlier, when there were 527,000.
State Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Lake County Republican, has experienced both eras of higher education in Ohio. He went to college in the 1970s during the construc- tion boom. These days, he’s chair of the Senate Work- force and Higher Education Committee, and is learning about how university leaders are adjusting to the enroll- ment changes.
“We don’t want any of these places to close,” Cirino said. “We want to make sure that they’re strategically planning out and prepar- ing for the change in demo- graphics, and the change in the workforce as well.”
Some of the schools, such as Lakeland Community Col- lege, are experiencing enroll- ment declines at the same time that they’re paying bond debt for the construction of buildings they don’t nec- essarily have the popula- tion to support. In the case of Lakeland, where Cirino was a trustee in the 1990s, the school has underlying assets to secure the bonds, he said.
Most Ohio colleges need to consider their footprint, and whether it’s necessary to have so many buildings in so many counties — especially at a time when online learn- ing is on the rise, Cirino said.
While Ohio is hardly alone in its enrollment declines, the state’s losses cut deeper than the rest of the country.
In the fall of 2018, 19.3 million students attended public and private colleges across the U.S. In the fall of 2023, enrollment nationwide was 18.4 million, a 4.7% decrease, according to data prepared for cleveland.com/the Plain Dealer by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a higher education research organization.
In that same time, the cen- ter determined enrollment at Ohio schools dropped 10.7% to 542,000 students in pub- lic and private schools in the fall of 2023.
In the Midwest — an area that the center grouped as Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Indi- ana, Kansas, Michigan, Min- nesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin — enrollment decreased from 3.7 million students to 3.4 million, an 8.1% drop, which was also higher than the national average.
The average age of resi- dents in the Midwest is older than other parts of the coun- try, and Midwestern states generally have smaller Latino and other immigrant populations that have higher birthrates.
The places with the highest enrollment growth between 2010 and 2020, according to the nonprofit Educational Data Initiative, were New Hampshire at 149.6%, Utah at 54.7%, Idaho at 44.4%, Delaware at 6.2% Washing- ton, D.C., at 6% and Texas at 4.3%.
Still, not all hope is lost for Ohio. Some schools are growing enrollment. The University of Cincinnati, for instance, grew enrollment 14% between 2012 and 2022, according to the Ohio Depart- ment of Higher Education.
And Duffey, the state’s chancellor of higher edu- cation, noted that Ohio none- theless draws more students to the state than it loses to other states —pointing to a report his department put out that showed about 25,500 freshmen came to
Ohio to attend college com- pared with 13,700 who left Ohio to attend college else- where in fall 2020. That results in a “net import” of 11,800 students, or the third highest in the nation.
This net import figure is important because, the state hopes, going to college in Ohio means you’re more likely to stay. Many students get internships in the state, which turn into job offers and building a career and life here.
Generally, college is still considered a good invest- ment, as numerous studies over the years have shown graduates earn more money and pay more in taxes, Duf- fey said.
For instance, a 2021 Georgetown University study found the average lifetime wages of a full-time, full-year worker with a high school diploma are $1.6 million, compared to those with an associate’s degree, earning $2 million, and those with a bachelor’s degree, earn- ing $2.8 million.
Local control
In Ohio, many commu- nity colleges are supported by property taxes and the state’s system of higher edu- cation generally operates under local control. Duf- fey, the Ohio chancellor of higher education, said he can’t really dictate which schools get to offer jour- nalism programs or which schools get to offer film studies. So the overall sys- tem has some duplication in degrees for which there are not enough jobs.
“Ohio’s system is one of local governance, individ- ual boards of trustees and sometimes county govern- ments with levies,” Duffey said. “There’s a lot of local control. And what that means is we have a laboratory of ideas, and that does produce a risk of duplication.”
During his campus vis- its, Duffey said he tries to
encourage schools to grad- uate students with special- izations, which can elimi- nate duplication.
“Shawnee State for example, has an excellent video game development program that really doesn’t exist at other campuses,” he said. “And if you look at Sin- clair Community College, they’re doing things in UAS (unmanned aircraft systems), drones and things like that, that pretty much nobody else is doing. Sinclair is lead- ing in the two-year sector in particular in artificial intelligence as well. And so to the degree that they specialize, I think that’s really helpful.”
He also wants schools to think about student demand, which these days is in online degrees and in nontradi- tional older adult students who want to return to finish degrees but aren’t available to, for example, take a biol- ogy lab at 10 a.m. during the workweek.
Students not only want online courses, but to move at their own pace — breez- ing through concepts that come easy and spending more time at those that are a challenge.
“When you have it teth- ered to a traditional semes- ter system it doesn’t allow that,” Duffey said. “So those are the pressures that I think everyone has seen.”
A little over 10 years ago, there was talk about merg- ing Ohio’s public colleges together under one uni- versity with several cam- puses throughout the state to reduce overhead and dupli- cation. Think of the Univer- sity of California system, which has 10 campuses, and the California State Univer- sity system, which has 23 campuses.
The idea never took off. Cirino, the Senate’s higher education committee chair, said the idea of a Cal State system in Ohio doesn’t really appeal to him: “One of the things I like about Ohio’s institutions is that they are autonomous... How different each institution is.”
Miami University is differ- ent from Youngstown State or Central State, Ohio’s public historically Black university.
“They have slightly dif- ferent missions. Their stu- dent complexion is differ- ent. Some are urban, some are not urban,” Cirino said. “And I don’t think a homo- geneous educational sys- tem would serve the state of Ohio well.”
However, in some cases, consolidation could be smart, he said, if two insti- tutions agree to it.
“I know Akron and Cleve- land State talked last year about combining their law school. Consolidation doesn’t just mean you would merge two operations. Businesses do this all the time,” said Cirino, who was a CEO of medical device and distribution companies prior to his time in the legislature. “So that could mean there’s shared services. I did this when I was running my companies. If I had five divisions, not every division needed to have a VP of HR, right? So we would have a pool that they could draw from and it really cut expenses and was more efficient.”
However, Cirino noted that the situation may be different for private colleges, over which the state has no control. Some of those may find merging is the best way to go forward.
“We’ve known for some time that the private colleges and universities are under stress,” he said. “They’re suffering from the same student population. They don’t get the government support that the public universities get. Many of them are seeing endowments reduced.”
Although Ohio’s public colleges are largely independent from state control over dayto-day affairs, state support is necessary for the strength of the entire system, said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, who notes that Ohio’s support of higher education lags the national average.
In 1980, Ohio spent on average $11,700 in revenue per full-time equivalent student, when adjusting for inflation. In 2022, it was $14,890, a 27.3% increase, according to figures from State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
But nationally, it was $12,102 in 1980 and $17,393 in 2022, a 43.7% increase.
Pete van Lier of Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, studied state education funding for his testimony to the legislature on the state’s budget bill last year. He found the key figure in the state’s allocation formula to colleges and universities, called the State Share of Instruction, has in fact decreased from $1.6 billion in 2006 to $1.5 billion in 2022 when adjusted for inflation, based on legislative data.
A number of schools, including Lakeland Community College, have indicated they will try to renegotiate their collective bargaining agreements with faculty in coming months. Senate Bill 83 — which is sponsored by Cirino, the Senate higher ed committee chairman — would allow schools to lay off faculty through cutting programs. It has passed the Senate and is awaiting a vote on the House floor,
Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, is worried about the future of collective bargaining rights. University presidents come and go, but faculty members usually stay at a school for their entire careers, and with that longevity comes unique insights, she said. Faculty’s voice is necessary in the future of Ohio’s colleges and universities.
“It’s really important for faculty to maintain their collective bargaining rights,” she said. “Besides the state disinvestment, what we’ve seen at a number of institutions is mismanagement, and a lot of people think that institutions of higher education should operate like businesses. But it’s exactly this business top-down model that has created problems at colleges and universities.”
‘If you look at Sinclair Community College, they’re doing things in UAS (unmanned aircraft systems), drones and things like that, that pretty much nobody else is doing. Sinclair is leading in the two-year sector in particular in artificial intelligence as well. And so to the degree that they specialize, I think that’s really helpful.’