Raising Educational Attainment in Ohio
For any strategic plan to be successful, it must have a clear purpose. This plan seeks to raise the overall educational attainment level of Ohio’s workforce. However, Ohio will not advance economically if our rate of improvement is slower than our competitors around the country and the world. Educational attainment of Ohioans is going up, but not as fast as the leading nations of the world. Therefore the educational attainment of Ohio’s workforce must catch up with outside competitors.
Accomplishing this goal requires higher education in Ohio to do three things:
- graduate more people,
- keep them here after graduation, and
- attract more talent to Ohio so that we become a net importer of people with college degrees, and not a net exporter as we are today.
Graduating people is the core business of higher education, and the institutions in Ohio are well aware of Governor Strickland’s call, expressed in his first State of the State address, to enroll 230,000 more students by 2017 and to graduate an additional 20 percent. Still, accomplishing this goal will require us to improve our quality and productivity in order to get to the scale of activity that is needed.
Accepting responsibility for keeping our graduates in Ohio is likely to be a more controversial assertion. We assume that keeping graduates in Ohio has to do with economic and sociological factors beyond our control. In 24 fact, there are a number of significant steps that institutions can take to keep graduates in Ohio. These range from promoting co-op and internship programs that link students to Ohio businesses, to creating an entrepreneurial environment on campus that helps generate new and exciting career opportunities for graduates, to building neighborhoods around our campuses that make students want to stay in the area to live and work.
Similarly, our colleges and universities can make Ohio a net importer of people with college degrees. Schools can attract students and faculty to study and teach in world-class academic programs and institutes, and to partake of the quality of life and entrepreneurial environment in and around our campuses. These recruits often bring spouses, partners, and colleagues who are also highly educated, and are major players in the creation of highly charged, fast-growing communities.
The Ohio Department of Development rightly spends a good portion of its time trying to attract businesses from other states and countries to locate in Ohio. The state must expend as much effort attracting the talent that could start new businesses.
Ohio has two great academic resources – the state’s system of public colleges and universities, and the state’s unique collection of private colleges and universities. This report details strategies to help meet the three-part test of graduating more students, keeping them here, and making Ohio a net importer of people with college degrees.
Ohio’s colleges and universities are vast reservoirs of intellectual innovation and energy. This plan calls for concentrating that energy not only on improving our institutions of higher education, but also on improving the condition of our state as a whole. If the goals of increased enrollment and graduation rates are met, but the state still falls behind economically, then we cannot truly judge our work to be a success or the taxpayer’s investment to have been well spent. We must, and we will, do more.
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