Restoring Ohio’s Heritage in Higher Education

The Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents reports on Ohio's effort to turn around a decline in its higher education system, including a link to a "comprehensive 10-year plan designed to achieve the governor's stated goal of 230,000 more college students a year."

The erosion was so gradual that many of us failed to notice until great damage had already been done.

Ohio, with two of the first colleges west of the Alleghenies established within six years of its birth in 1803, has long valued higher education, providing direct support to its public universities for more than 130 years and welcoming dozens of private institutions with a rich variety of religious and secular missions. At the dawn of the last century, Ohio was the era’s Silicon Valley, home to men like Wilbur and Orville Wright, automotive inventors Charles F. Kettering and John H. Patterson, and innovative public works engineer Arthur Morgan, visionaries whose genius led to the modern industries that fueled America’s—and most particularly Ohio’s—prosperity.

So what happened?