MANSFIELD – College affordability and local employment were on the minds of Sen. Larry Obhof and Dr. Michael Drake, president of The Ohio State University, on Friday afternoon.
President Drake served as the keynote speaker of a leadership luncheon sponsored by The Ohio State University Mansfield on Friday, and hosted by the Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, the Richland Community Development Group, and Destination Mansfield/Richland County.
Before the luncheon, Drake sat down with Richland Source and local media to speak on the crucial role the Ohio State Mansfield campus plays in the university as a whole.
“Regional campuses do a wonderful job of providing access to students from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances around Ohio,” Drake said.
Ohio State Mansfield in particular has had exceptional retention and graduation rates over the past few years. In a National Student Clearinghouse study of students who started college between 2007 and 2009, 85 percent of students who started at OSU-Mansfield were retained or graduated from a 2- or 4-year institution within six years.
In addition, Ohio State Mansfield’s six-year graduation rate is 50 percent higher than the national average for open admissions 4-year college campuses. The Mansfield campus ranks second in the state in graduation and retention rates, and seventeenth in the country.
“We know regional campuses are wonderful both as a stimulus for the economy of the region, but also as an opportunity for people who either prefer to be in the region or are place-bound,” Drake said. “It’s a great opportunity for students from the region to be able to study in the region.”
For local employers, the goal is to keep those students in the region and boost the Richland County economy. According to Sen. Obhof, a 2000 graduate from The Ohio State University, he believes workforce development is one of the biggest challenges facing this region in the near future.
“If you go back about six or seven years we had a serious problem with unemployment and people looking for work and there not being jobs available,” Obhof said. “Today we face a very different problem, we have a few hundred thousand people who are still working for work.”
Obhof stated there are more than 100,000 job openings at any given time in the state of Ohio, but close to 300,000 people at any given time looking for work.
“We really need to find ways to help the people who are looking for work, and the people who are looking for employees find each other and match up, but we also need to make sure those skill sets match up,” he said. “I think Ohio State is doing a great job being a partner in that both with us in the state legislature but more importantly with the local communities across the state.”
In order to grow a more educated, qualified workforce, college must first be affordable. Drake explained Ohio State has tried to improve affordability by paring down administrative costs and distributing that money back to moderate and low-income families with affordability grants.
“Last year we got up to $20 million in savings and pushed that to both Columbus and regional campuses,” Drake said. “In Mansfield, 710 students received these affordability grants out of the 15,000 students we have systemwide that are receiving the grants.”
Another program to increase affordability is a data analytics program currently being piloted at the Ohio State Mansfield campus. The program, Drake said, aims to help Ohio State better advise students on how to be the most successful within their education.
“Whatever the cost of going to college is, the value comes from getting a program completed and being able to go off and join your community,” he said. “Anything we can do to help people get to their degrees and help the time to the degree be as reasonable as possible will dramatically decrease the cost and dramatically increase the value.”
Access, affordability and excellence are the key pillars Drake implements as Ohio State’s president. The key is achieving all three of those goals without taking away from any one element.
“If you wanted to have just excellence, you could have a tiny little program that just admitted a few students, but then you don’t have access,” Drake explained. “If you wanted to have access, you could have everyone come in but not worry at all about your excellence and have a program that’s not particularly valuable.
“The trilogy is what we seek in every case, and that’s to continue to push up quality that adds value to make it as affordable as possible, and to make it available to as many people as possible.”
