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EDITORIAL: Dreams Denied: A New Report on Higher Education in Ohio Captures the Deepening Harm From the State's Lack of Investment

Posted on: Monday, 5 June 2006, 09:01 CDT

By The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

Jun. 5--Ohioans increasingly grasp the importance of higher education in their own lives and in the broader quality of life in the state. From 1998 to 2004, enrollment at Ohio public colleges and universities grew 15 percent, students, younger and older, filing into classes, aware that college graduates typically earn in a year 64 percent more than those workers with only a high school diploma.

Wendy Patton of Policy Matters Ohio shared these and other relevant numbers in a report released last week by the Cleveland think tank. What Below the Curve: Higher Education Opportunity in Ohio made plain is the state's elected leaders like to talk about the value of higher education, even inch in the right direction. They have been far less committed to taking the substantial steps necessary. Increased enrollment hasn't translated into closing the higher education gap that afflicts the state. Ohio ended the 1990s needing almost 300,000 additional college graduates within its borders to reach the national average. Today, it still needs almost 300,000.

When the moment calls for strengthening the investment in higher education, Ohio has taken the opposite approach, weakening its commitment. Higher education occupies a smaller portion of state spending than it did 25 years ago. In part, that reflects spending increases elsewhere, on primary and secondary schools, on Medicaid, the health care program for poor families and the indigent elderly (largely in nursing homes). Most telling has been the neglect at the Statehouse. Spending per college student in Ohio ranks 45th among the 50 states.

As Patton explained, the lack of public investment translates into soaring tuition rates. No problem, many lawmakers contend, arguing that college graduates earn higher incomes and thus are well positioned to pay off loans. Patton pointed out that the burden of all that borrowing falls most heavily on low- and middle-income families, Ohio ranking 49th in the percentage of family income required to pay for the lowest cost four-year public university.

Students find themselves putting off courses and eventual graduation. The education becomes prohibitively expensive, and the degree unattained.

Put more bluntly, the state has denied the American Dream to many Ohioans, restricted the mobility among the classes, the virtue so compelling about this country. The shortsightedness is almost shocking in a state desperate to make an economic transition, framing one of the most compelling of the report's recommendations: Ohio must find $559 million a year to reach the national average in spending per pupil. Money doesn't matter? Ask those students and their families with all it takes to get a degree but the dollars required to make the burden reasonable. Look at Ohio, its income lagging behind other states.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio)

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