MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Jonathan Tyler Baker

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

_____________________________________

Dr. Kate Rousmaniere, Director

_____________________________________

Dr. Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, Reader

_____________________________________

Dr. Joel Malin, Reader

_____________________________________

Dr. Michael Todd Edwards, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

IN A STATE OF ACCESS: OHIO PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION, 1945-1990

by

Jonathan T. Baker

In a State of Access is a historical study about the way public higher education in Ohio became

both generally accessible to nearly every citizen while also offering elite undergraduate and

graduate programs. This project grapples with the question of how national, state and regional

factors — from the mid-1940s through the end of the 20th century — influenced the way Ohio’s

leaders viewed the purpose of public higher education and influenced whether Ohio’s leaders

chose to focus on making public higher education more selective or accessible. State leaders

initially balked at the idea of funding public higher education. When they did decide to make the

investment, ideological battles, economic stagnation and the state’s budget deficit continually

influenced how state leaders viewed the purpose of public higher education. As a result, state

leaders never succeeded in building a system of public higher education that reflected a clearly

defined, well-organized purpose. This dissertation is the first full-length study about

contemporary public higher education in Ohio and one of the few case studies of any state’s

system of higher education. As the public and politicians at the state and national level pay more

attention to the accessibility of higher education, and the role of a college degree in a globalized,

service economy, a case study of Ohio helps us to better understand why public higher education

is still struggling with problems over access.

IN A STATE OF ACCESS: OHIO HIGHER EDUCATION, 1945-1990

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Educational Leadership

by

Jonathan T. Baker

The Graduate School

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2020

Dissertation Director: Kate Rousmaniere

©

Jonathan Tyler Baker

2020

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments v

Chapter One: Introduction — The Purpose(s) of Higher Education 1

Chapter Two: Being a Historian of Higher Education — Historiography and Literature

Review 11

Chapter Three: Panic Pause and Purpose in Ohio Higher Education 31

Chapter Four: A Policy of Accessibility 62

Chapter Five: Toward the Year 2000 82

Chapter Six: Where Do We Go from Here? 93

Epilogue 103

Bibliography 108

iv

DEDICATION

For my grandmother, Peggy, and in memory of my grandfather, Owen

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It all began the summer after fifth grade. The same summer Ken Griffey Jr. hit his 500th home

run: 2004. I was eleven and going to college. Sort of. I asked my parents to sign me up for a

program called “Kids in College,” or something to that effect. Elementary and Middle School-

age students picked a subject and took three hours of class a day for a week at Miami

University’s Middletown campus. Naturally, I picked a course on meteorology. Don’t ask me

why, I just loved weather despite being deathly afraid of thunderstorms. Every day my

grandfather would take me to-and-from Miami-Middletown, and I marveled at how he didn’t

need directions to the campus despite us living thirty minutes away. So, being a curious,

question-asking eleven-year-old, I asked him how he knew about the campus (my grandfather

didn’t go to college). He told me the campus is located on land that used to be a community park

for families who were employed at AK Steel — the place my grandfather worked for thirty

years. Even then I thought something didn’t sound right. Why did AK Steel, one of the largest

employers in the county, give up land used for their employees’ enjoyment, so Miami could

build a college? I’d been to plenty of parks and they were, at least to young Tyler, way more fun

than a college classroom. I filed that interaction away and spent the rest of the week with my

head turned towards the clouds — literally.

By the time I graduated high school and had taken, but barely passed a calculus class, my

dream of studying meteorology had been replaced by a love of history, particularly studying the

biography of powerful people. My high school United States’ history teacher, an Army veteran-

turned-academic, Mark Pierett, taught me how to love the subject. He helped me see how

powerful people, especially in the twentieth century, made consequential decisions that shaped

millions of lives. That was cool and all, but what really stuck with me was how these folks got

into such a powerful position. Sure, they came from rich families (both Roosevelts, Bush 41 &

43), had some good luck (Wilson), and sometimes oozed charisma (Kennedy), but I noticed

something else: they had similar higher education backgrounds at institutions known universally

by their first name, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. I began to wonder how a college degree

from one place meant less than a degree from another institution. Wasn’t going to college

vi

enough? I quickly learned that where somebody goes to college is perhaps more important than

simply going to college.

I started scrutinizing where I was going to apply for undergraduate studies. The Ohio

State University was the state’s crown jewel. Except I couldn’t stand the idea of going there.

My economics teacher and de facto life coach at the time, Ben Peterson, told me The Ohio State

is an exceptional school, but most of their rankings came from graduate, not undergraduate

education. I would probably get lost in the shuffle. If you know me, I’m not exactly the type of

person who enjoys getting lost in the shuffle. He said I should look at liberal arts colleges;

they’re small, offer a rigorous academic program, and give students more time with faculty. So,

I looked into liberal arts colleges.

When I enrolled at Transylvania University in 2011 I felt like I had found my dream

school. After a rough first semester, I met Dr. Ken Slepyan, a History professor who taught a

survey on Western Civilization. I was hooked. He became my advisor, and soon enough, I

began asking him questions about his academic background. He told me he went to the

University of Michigan, a state-assisted public institution, for his Ph.D. I’d never really thought

about why the University of Michigan had such an outstanding reputation when other state-

assisted public institutions like Eastern Michigan University or Wayne State University were

considered good schools, but not held in the same high regard as their neighbor in Ann Arbor.

I shelved the thought and headed off to a graduate program in History at the University of

Kentucky.

While at Kentucky, I realized I could study the history of American higher education,

which made me quite happy. I combined what I had learned about twentieth-century United

States’ leaders, my experience at Miami’s branch campus, and the fact that I attended a liberal

arts college — the endangered species of American higher education — and wrote a Master’s

thesis on the way students slowly moved towards public institutions and away from the liberal

arts college using Transylvania as a case study. I earned my Bachelors with an emphasis in

World History, but that didn’t matter much: I couldn’t shake this desire to understand why

American higher education kept changing and how the system took on a multi-purpose identity.

I spent most days during my time at the University of Kentucky finding ways to talk with my

advisor, Dr. Melanie Beals Goan, about my research and listening to Dr. John Thelin complicate

vii

what I thought I knew. They both deserve more thanks than I can express for dealing with my

desire to be ever-present in their company.

I arrived at Miami University in 2017 to study for a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership. I

was attracted to the program for a lot of reasons, but I’ll talk about the two that are most

important. First, I wanted to be closer to my family. My grandfather’s health was failing and I

hadn’t made the time (and in many ways still haven’t) to be close with my parents. The man

who drove me to Miami-Middletown (among a thousand other places) passed away in 2018. His

story of creating a middle-class family from wages as an industrial laborer, combined with my

grandma operating a successful business, my uncle Todd earning a four-year degree through

part-time study, and my mom not having the opportunity of pursuing a college degree all

influenced me to better understand how economic changes and access to higher education have

significant effects on the lives of every American, especially those living in the shadow of

deindustrialization. They’ve pushed me to do great things and refused to accept anything less

than what they believed I am capable of achieving. I wouldn’t be submitting a dissertation if it

weren’t for them.

Second, I wanted to work with Dr. Kate Rousmaniere. There are few occasions in life

when you truly feel like you got more luck than you deserved. I could be home and work with a

renowned historian of American education. I’d never stopped thinking about that week at

Miami-Middletown in 2004 and why the school was so different from The Ohio State or

Transylvania. Dr. Kate pushed me to think about the purpose of higher education, how its

changed over time, who/what was responsible for the change, and how I could study Ohio’s

system of public higher education to find an answer to questions I’d thought about for years.

She’s a rock star, a friend, and an excellent advisor.

Sometimes I read acknowledgements and think folks mention mentors and colleagues out

of obligation since they list names at a rapid-fire pace. Now here I am wanting to thank

everybody who has helped me along the way and I see how limited of a space I, and other

authors, have. From Transylvania, Dr. Gregg Bocketti and Melissa McEuen sharpened my

writing and analytical skills. Dr. Bocketti would look at an argument I made in a paper and often

say, “Why should we care?” Because of him, I understand why a historical argument needs to

have significance. As for Dr. McEuen, she forced me to think about my positionality and the

responsibility of being a historian. After I submitted a final paper for a course called "Women in

viii

American Life & Thought," I told her I felt like I couldn’t write about women because I am a

man. She went silent and I could see the disappointment in her expression. Looking back on

that moment, I’m pretty ashamed, yet extraordinarily thankful she called me out on my

ignorance. I am a man, but that has nothing to do with my job as a historian, which is, in part, to

uncover voices silenced by marginalization and oppression.

During my time at Miami University, I’ve had the pleasure of working with bright,

talented, caring, extraordinary professors and colleagues who changed my life. Dr. Tom Poetter

modeled the way character and integrity are integral to successful teaching and scholarship. I

also need to thank Dr. Brittany Arsonson, Dr. Joel Malin, Dr. Kathleen Knight-Abowitz and Dr.

Elisa Abes for treating me like a colleague. All of you are truly outstanding.

Hannah Stohry did not let an occasion go by where she could challenge me to think

harder about issues of race, place and epistemological difference. Ashley Cartell Johnson, Don

Murray, Gul Rind, Cindy Sanders, Jason Harnish, Prince Johnson and Kristan Barczak have

treated me with outstanding kindness. I love a good conversation about nothing and they always

generously gave their time to shoot the breeze despite all of us having work to do. I also need to

express my gratefulness to Virginia Phelps, Cindy Ulreich, Kathy Rosenberger and Kari Arnett.

I'm inept at finding/doing things around the office, yet they always had the patience to deal with

me. It is hard to accept that I won’t be in direct proximity to everyone mentioned here as I finish

my Ph.D. and end my formal education journey. But I know everything they’ve given me is a

foundation for a fruitful, exciting future.

1

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: THE PURPOSE(S) OF OHIO PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION

Ohioans will notice two distinct characteristics about their state’s system of public higher

education: it’s both highly selective and extremely accessible. On the surface, these two qualities

don’t mean much. Most of the United States’ public colleges and universities are no more than a

century old. An even larger number lack any sort of academically prestigious reputation. As a

result, the bulk of American institutions of higher education offer something close to unlimited

access. David Labaree described the historical development of American higher education as the

development of a three-pronged criterion that colleges and universities have to meet in order to

be considered ‘elite’ or ‘prestigious’ that includes a university’s age, competitive undergraduate

and graduate admission, and a strong enough academic program to reap the rewards of research

funding on a consistent basis.1

By these categories, most public colleges and universities in the United States aren’t

considered elite, prestigious or competitive. As of 2020, a large proportion of higher education

institutions are open to all enrollment/universal access, also known as non-selective institutions.

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, “most colleges admit

most applicants, and the rarified world of Ivy League admissions is almost completely irrelevant

to what goes on in most of higher education.”2 Nonetheless, some public institutions remain

highly competitive. In the case of Ohio, a student can gain general admission to a public college

or university, but not every college or university. Because even though access is a defining

1 David Labaree, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 9.

2 Scott Jaschik, “More Applications, Plenty of Spaces,” Inside Higher Ed, September 8, 2016

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/08/nacac-survey-shows-most-colleges-admit-

most-applicants.

2

characteristic of most public universities, Ohio’s system of public higher education is organized

to offer both access and prestige. In fact, few Ohio institutions can offer both competitive,

academic excellence and universal access. Although, upon closer examination, this statement is

more complicated. For example, Miami University, Oxford is often regarded as one of the most

competitive, selective public universities in Ohio with an admission rate of 65%. Fifteen miles

down the road, Miami University’s two-year branch campus in Hamilton has an acceptance rate

of 100%.3

Miami University is not unique in this attribute. In fact, all of Ohio’s public four-year

institutions operate branch campuses. And as the number of branch campuses has grown

alongside the number of two-year community colleges, Ohio’s public four-year institutions also

added nearly 200 graduate degree programs — a process that has rarely slowed since it began in

the late-1960s. In other words, Ohio higher education is continuing to uphold Labaree’s criterion

for prestige while simultaneously building a pedigree for universal access. How did this unique

situation come about? While some historians have studied why and how some public

universities made it to the pinnacle of American academic excellence, there is no historical

explanation for why and how some state systems of public higher education came to be both elite

and accessible. Historians of American higher education have yet to study how, or why, some

individual public institutions or entire state systems of higher education created a balance

between universal access and academic excellence.

There is no better time for historians to begin this work. Going to college is more of an

American expectation at the present moment than it has been at any other point in the nation’s

3 Initially referred to as ‘satellite’ campuses, regional branch campuses are categorized as two-

year institutions financially and organizationally connected to a four-year public institution.

These campuses offer students a choice of two-year terminal degree programs or a low-cost

option to complete coursework towards a four-year degree that will be completed at the four-year

institution. Regional branch campuses are known for their near universal access, low-cost tuition

and lack of residential facilities. For more information, see:

https://www.ohiohighered.org/campuses.

3

history.4 This is especially true for the American working class.5 Until the mid-1970s, industrial

manufacturing jobs could be obtained without a college degree. By the 1980s, service sector and

technological jobs began to require higher education.6 America’s youth and those who wish to

be re-skilled for a new job need higher education for employment.7 Indeed, there is a need for

accessible higher education.

The need for accessible higher education is particularly acute in the Midwest, due to the

region’s economic characteristic commonly referred to as the ‘Rust Belt.’ The collapse of

industrial manufacturing in the Midwestern United States that began in the 1970s and

accompanying national transition towards a service sector economy left states like Ohio in a

4 Mark A. Hecker, “The Importance of a College Education,” chicagotribune.com. Chicago

Tribune, December 12, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-

ptb-heckler-guest-column-st-0912-story.html ; “Going to University Is More Important Than

Ever for Young People.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, February 3, 2018.

https://www.economist.com/international/2018/02/03/going-to-university-is-more-important-

than-ever-for-young-people. ; David Leonhardt, “Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say,”

The New York Times, August 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/upshot/is-college-

worth-it-clearly-new-data-say.html?module=inline ; Natalie Proulx, “Should Everyone Go to

College?” The New York Times, January 16, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/learning/should-everyone-go-to-college.html.

5 Don Lee, “Is College Still Worth It? Pew Research Says Yes,” Los Angeles Times, February 11,

2014. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-earnings-college-premium-0140211-

story.html; Elisa Stephens, “A College Degree Is More Important Than Ever, So Long as It Is the

Right Degree,” HuffPost, May 25, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-college-degree-is-

more_b_619592; Jaques Steinberg, “Plan B: Skip College,” The New York Times, May 15,

2010.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/weekinreview/16steinberg.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=

FC6786CE5C9B9B048EDBB997D83B5F92&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL.

6 Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth, “US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its

Potential Future,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (2014): 3–26; Justin R. Pierce and

Peter K. Schott, “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment,” American

Economic Review 106, no. 7 (2016): 1632-62.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20131578; Roberto A. Ferdman, “The Decline

of the Small American Family Farm in One Chart,” The Washington Post September 16, 2014,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-decline-of-the-small-american-

family-farm-in-one-chart/?noredirect=on.

7 Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, & Jeff Strohl, Recovery: Job Growth and Education

Requirements Through 2020 (Washington: Georgetown Public Policy Institute: Center on

Education and the Workforce, 2014), 22.

4

precarious position.8 The state’s once thriving industrial sector has declined by nearly 40% since

the mid-1970s and, in 2019, the most abundant employers are located in sectors like health,

hospitality and customer service that require a higher education degree.9 Because of the need for

a more educated workforce, the number of public colleges and universities has increased

substantially since the mid-1970s while overall enrollments — despite moments of decline —

have steadily grown, too. Ohio — and the Midwest as a whole — lags behind other regions,

such as the South and West, in the number of jobs in developing industries, population growth,

per capita income, and number of residents with a four-year college degree.10

Compared to states in the Southern and Western United States, and other Midwestern

states like Michigan, Ohio was relatively late in developing a system of accessible, two-year

public colleges across the state. Until the mid-1960s, Ohio policymakers did not have a deep

commitment to public higher education. Ohio’s liberal arts colleges and state-flagship

university, founded in the 19th century, earned a national reputation for academic excellence long

before the first two-year public university campuses opened in the late-1960s and early-1970s.

But compared to other Midwestern states, Ohio was slow in developing other public, accessible

higher education institutions, such as two-year colleges.11 In a State of Access is about how Ohio

8 Paul D. Staudohar and Holly E. Brown, eds., Deindustrialization and Plant Closure

(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987); Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory: Auto

Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);

Jefferson Cowie, Joseph Heathcott, and Barry Bluestone, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings

of Deindustrialization, (Ithica, NY: Ilr Press, 2003); Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The

Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling

of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

9G Scott Thomas, "Ohio Lost 346K Manufacturing Jobs in a Decade," Dayton Business Journal,

May 26, 2011, http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/news/2011/05/26/ohio-lost-345600-

manufacturing-jobs.html; National Association of Manufacturers, US Manufacturing Statistics -

Manufacturing & Trade Data By State

(Ohio), http://www.nam.org/~/media/9FB12626D4F64F9586A971C573E8AEE9.ashx

10 Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, “Demographic Trends in the 20th Century,” U.S. Census

Bureau, 2002: https://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf ; Benjamin Austin, Edward

Glaeser, and Lawrence Summers, Jobs for the Heartland: Place-Based Policies in 21st Century

America (Washington D.C., Brookings Research Institute, 2018), 151-255.

11 For example, Michigan had twenty-five two-year institutions in operation before Ohio opened

a branch campus or community college. A quick glance at the list of Michigan’s colleges and

universities shows that more than 80 percent of its two-year institutions opened before 1966 —

the year Ohio’s oldest regional two-year institution, Miami University’s Middletown campus,

5

higher education became, on one hand, so selective and elite, while, at the same time, accessible

to nearly every citizen, and how ideological battles, economic stagnation and the state’s inability

to fund higher education ultimately shaped that process from the mid-1940s through the end of

the 20th century.

I contend that statewide governing bodies in higher education, namely, the Board of

Regents, originally — and strategically — organized Ohio public higher education on a socio-

economically stratified model, which prioritized elite graduate programs that would bring the

state much needed capital investment while simultaneously funding two-year institutions as an

avenue for workers to gain new skills in an evolving Ohio economy and ensure all Ohioans could

gain entry into higher education — regardless of the institution’s quality — if they wished. The

Board of Regents was established by the Ohio General Assembly in 1963 to be the planning and

coordinating agency for the State’s system of higher education. Its role, according to the

Regents’ mission statement, “is to help develop state policies to meet the needs of Ohioans for

postsecondary education by effectively utilizing the resources available in public and private

institutions.”12 The Regents consists of nine members appointed by the Governor and two ex-

officio members, all of whom must serve a nine-year term. The Board of Regent’s strategy was

complicated and contradictory because of the way it emphasized both elitism and access;

vocational skills and professional knowledge; associates degrees and the Ph.D. The Board of

Regents also didn’t anticipate the effects of deindustrialization and a budget deficit that impacted

the state for nearly two decades.

Due to the Board of Regent’s bifurcated approach to higher education, their plan to

educate a new professional workforce, develop elite research programs, and also attract new

industries to Ohio, ultimately failed. Where the Board of Regents’ plan did succeed, however, is

in the area of accessibility: over 100 two-year institutions have opened since the publication of

the Ohio Higher Education Master Plan in 1966. Nonetheless, the question remains whether the

Board of Regents ultimately failed in their goal of creating a system that was both accessible for

opened and 50 percent of their two-year institutions were founded before nearly every one of

Ohio’s community or technical colleges.

12 Ohio Board of Regents, “Chancellor’s Report, July 1, 1973 — June 30, 1979,” Southwest

Ohio Regional Depository, 1979, 2.

6

those who wanted to attend college and focused on the academic rigor of graduate-level research

that could lead to economic development in the state.

Much of contemporary political debate about higher education is about cost and

accessibility. This study explores the historical context of that debate.13 Because higher

education is a state responsibility, a study on the development of Ohio’s contemporary system of

higher education can offer a significant contribution to our historical understanding of the role of

state government in defining higher education’s purpose. There are currently very few in-depth

studies on state systems of higher education. A dissertation provides the space to conduct a

manageable study of a single state, and it is my hope that future historians will engage in more

single-state studies or conduct a comparative study.

Ohio is an excellent state to study in an exploration of the history of accessibility to

higher education in the 20th century. The state is currently the seventh most populated in the

Union and ranked in the top five until 1970.14 Ohio has long boasted a reputation as one of the

nation’s largest industrial manufacturers.15 Moreover, Ohio often played a crucial role as a

bellwether state during Presidential elections and has a rich political tradition in both the

Republican and Democratic Party.16 Ohio is known for the presence of labor unions as well as

farmers while gaining national attention for the decay of cities like Cleveland and the plight of

13 Matthew Yglesias, “Democrats' Ongoing Argument About Free College, Explained,” Vox,

June 24, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/6/24/18677785/democrats-free-college-sanders-

warren-biden; Anya Kamenetz, “Presidential Contenders Make Higher Education Costs A Hot

Button Issue,” NPR, June 26, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/736138081/democratic-

presidential-contenders-make-higher-education-costs-a-hot-button-issu; Zack Friedman,

“Student Loan Debt Statistics In 2019: A $1.5 Trillion Crisis,” Forbes, February 25, 2019,

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/02/25/student-loan-debt-statistics-

2019/#4f6de995133f.

14 Erik Ostermeier, “Ohio's Population Rank Over the Last 100 Years,” Smart Politics, February

1, 2016, https://editions.lib.umn.edu/smartpolitics/2011/01/14/ohios-population-rank-over-the/

15 Kevin F. Kern and Gregory S. Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State (West Sussex:

Wiley, 2014), 390.

16 Mark Heyne, “The Critical Importance Of Ohio In Presidential Elections Now And Through

History,” WVXU: Cincinnati Public Radio, September 19, 2016,

https://www.wvxu.org/post/critical-importance-ohio-presidential-elections-now-and-through-

history#stream/0; Howard Wilkinson, “Ohio, When It Comes to Choosing Presidents, You're It.

No Doubt About It,” WVXU: Cincinnati Public Radio, June 14, 2015,

https://www.wvxu.org/post/ohio-when-it-comes-choosing-presidents-youre-it-no-doubt-about-

it#stream/0.

7

rural areas like Athens County in the state’s Appalachian annex.17 As the national economy

moved towards sectors like health care and technology in the early-1980s, Ohio fell behind, and

the economic crisis created by the collapse of manufacturing made Ohioans participants in both

the Reagan Revolution and election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.18

Unlike other nations, the United States does not have a national system of higher

education, which means that each state controls their public colleges and universities.19 Most

states have yet to conduct a historical study of their colleges and universities; there is no research

on how Ohio higher education became, on one hand, so expensive while, at the same time,

accessible to nearly every citizen. And since political leaders and the public are becoming more

interested in state spending for services like higher education, historians should help build a

collective understanding about the way states have gone about funding higher education and how

today’s policymakers can learn from the past as they consider new directions in state-assisted

higher education. This dissertation grapples with the question of how Ohio legislators and other

policymakers designed the state’s higher education system to be both selective and accessible,

and how those contradictory initiatives shaped, or were influenced by, the state’s economy.

Ohio’s legislators were deeply guided by either their political ideology or affiliation to the state’s

industrial manufactures — both of which changed considerably over time. The Board of

Regents was focused more on using state-assisted higher education as a catalyst for economic

transformation, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, as a gateway for socio-economic improvement.

17 Michael Shields, “Manufacturing a High-Wage Ohio,” The Century Foundation, March 12,

2018, https://tcf.org/content/report/manufacturing-high-wage-ohio/?session=1.

18Stephen T. Pfeiffer, Hostile Takeover: The New Right Insurgent Movement, Ronald Reagan,

and the Republican Party, 1977-1984, Unpublished Dissertation, Ohio University, 2012;

Rich Exner, “Trump Had at Least 70 Percent of the Vote in 30 Ohio Counties; 6 Takeaways

From Ohio's 2016 Presidential Vote,” cleveland.com, November 9, 2016,

https://www.cleveland.com/election-results/2016/11/trump_had_at_least_70_percent.html; Dan

Horn and Jeremy Fugleberg, “How Donald Trump Won Ohio.” Cincinnati.com, November 11,

2016, https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2016/11/09/how-trump-won-

ohio/93560164/.

19The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education,

Purposes, Policies, Performance: Higher Education and the Fulfillment of a State’s Public

Agenda, 2003. http://www.highereducation.org/reports/aiheps/aiheps.shtml.

8

Other questions guiding this study include: To what extent did policymakers in Ohio

decide between offering universal access and creating competitive universities, or did it decide to

pursue both options? To what extent did economic factors play a role in what type of colleges

and universities Ohio policy makers decided to support? Were Ohio state decisions regarding

higher education based on political ideology or other forms of politically-influenced policy

decisions? What most influenced state leaders in their decisions regarding higher education?

Did state leaders’ thinking about higher education change over time? To what extent did the

process of deindustrialization in the 1970s? play a role in the way policymakers viewed higher

education? Compared to other states, did Ohio get a late start in the development of a two-year

public college system? Why did state policymakers want a system of two-year colleges? Did

their decisions influence the contemporary economic status of Ohio? Did Ohio fail to produce a

system of public higher education that benefited the state economy?

This dissertation brings together historical literature on the recent history of American

higher education, political and economic histories of Ohio, a variety of contemporary studies

from sociologists and economists, and primary sources from Ohio’s General Assembly, Board of

Regents and state leaders who had a role in the development of contemporary public higher

education. In the last two decades, the history of American higher education has received

attention from more than historians. In particular, sociologists have studied issues of class, race,

equal opportunity and hegemony within the context of American higher education in an attempt

to better understand how systemic disadvantage is historically rooted in the walls of colleges and

universities. While race and racism in higher education are of longstanding interest to historians

of higher education, sociologists have begun to look at socio-economic status and the resulting

economic stratification created by the American higher education hierarchy that spans from

community colleges at the bottom to elite, top-tier private institutions at the apex.20 The work of

20 Listed here is a snapshot of the sociological research that intersects socio-economic status and

American higher education: Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of

Education and Stratification (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Amy E. Stitch &

Carrie Freie (eds.), The Working Classes and Higher Education: Inequality of Access,

Opportunity and Outcome (New York: Routledge University Press, 2017); William G. Bowen,

Matthew M. Chingos and Michael S. McPhearson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing

College at America’s Public Universities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Tressie

McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy

(New York: The New Press, 2017); Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream:

9

these scholars is fundamental to understanding how socio-economic status became such a

polarizing issue in higher education and how that hierarchy was created. Many of the scholars

looking at socio-economic inequality in higher education analyze the motives of state and

national policy makers vis-à-vis the construction of contemporary systems of higher education.

Despite the pioneering work of sociologists and educational historians, several gaps still

remain in the historiographic canon of American higher education as it relates to socio-economic

stratification, economic hierarchies, and the way some state systems of public higher education

have focused on both prestige and accessibility. In a State of Access hopes to full these gaps by

providing a multi-decade study of how Ohio’s legislators and policymakers articulated a vision

for what they saw as the purpose of a state-assisted, public system of higher education. This

project does not offer wholesale acceptance, or rejection, of how these powerful constituencies

decided to purpose Ohio public education. Rather, this project critically engages with the

decades-long decision-making process, analyzes the successes and shortcomings of state leaders,

and provides a base for developing future studies on state systems of higher education.

This project includes a literature review and three research-based chapters. The literature

review, in chapter two, highlights how In a State of Access relates to, or is influenced by,

previous studies. Each subsequent chapter moves chronologically from the end of World War II

to the early-1990s. Chapter Three argues that state policymakers and legislators initially delayed

investing in public higher education during World War II before eventually taking investment in

higher education seriously beginning in the 1960s, which began an ongoing battle about the

purpose of public higher education. Chapter four examines how Ohio leaders responded to the

state’s worst financial crisis in the 1970s, how the economic recession forced legislators and

policymakers to acknowledge the plight of Black Ohioans, and the way public higher education

was still far from being accessible for the state’s most disadvantaged populations. The fifth

chapter argues that the economic recession and the national crisis around K-12 schooling in the

mid-to-late 198-s directed state spending towards public education, which caused Ohio’s leaders

to find ways to fund public higher education that didn’t take more money away from the state

budget. In a State of Access concludes, in chapter six, with a section regarding the present

condition of Ohio public higher education, who the system serves, what the system’s purpose

Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

10

seems to be, if the state can take further action to address the cost of higher education and

possibilities for future research on state-systems of public higher education

11

CHAPTER TWO

BEING A HISTORIAN OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

As of 2020, there are entire sections of university libraries dedicated to the historical study of

American higher education and scores of academic journals publishing articles from the history

of student affairs to the development of university curricula. In the last three decades scholars

have slowly turned their attention to the development of, and consequences associated with, the

public, state-funded two- and four-year institution. Historians who chose to focus on this

particular area of American higher education have considered how variables like socio-economic

status and government policy created, or at the very least maintained, an economic and academic

hierarchy within America’s system of higher learning. Scholars and historians have spent less

time examining the history of public systems of higher education and related topics, such as, the

purpose policymakers had in forging systems of public higher education in the years following

World War II, how policymakers balanced the need of access with the desire to build elite

graduate programs, what influence their decisions had on intuitions like the economy, and what

contemporary policymakers can learn from previous attempts to make American higher

education more accessible.

Before moving on, the terms ‘access’ and ‘accessible’ should be defined. For the

purposes of this study, both terms are rooted in their financial-economic meaning and do not

consider physical accessibility or academic success. Access to higher education equates to an

individual’s financial ability to afford the cost of attending an institution that provides post-high

school learning. Access also refers to the cost of tuition at two-year and four-year public

colleges and universities. An institution of higher learning should be considered accessible if the

cost of attendance does not prevent, or financially hinder, a person’s ability to attend and

complete a degree program. Moreover, access, at least in the context of Ohio and the scope of

this dissertation, includes geographical accessibility, or the ability to commute to a campus.

12

These terms are more subjective than definitive, but they’re meant to provide clarification and

context for the reader throughout the document.

This chapter highlights the historical methodology used to reach the conclusions found in

this dissertation. Historians are often reluctant to show readers the process they used to analyze

documents and create their arguments. There is a benefit to doing work that helps both the

historian reflect upon their research process and convey those findings in a way that’s inviting to

all readers. This chapter also introduces the recent work of historians and economists who have

studied the way consumerism, citizenship, and socio-economic status have come together in the

last century to produce economic citizenship — a term and framework that is vital to

understanding how access to higher education has become so important.

The final section will detail the historiography of American higher education since the

1950s while noting how the studies of American colleges and universities closely follows the

growth and development of higher learning as a whole while mirroring changes in America’s

social, cultural, economic and political landscape. This section will also show how historians

have yet to study the economic consequences associated with delayed state investment in public

higher education. At the end of this chapter, several points should be clear: that there are distinct

economic and political variables inseparable to the study of Ohio public higher education that

have implications for higher education in 2020 and this dissertation’s significance is rooted in the

need for historians to look at the past for possible solutions to contemporary problems in public

higher education.

Positionality and the Historian

There is no perfect way to study the history of American higher education, but there are new

ways that we have yet to explore. Historians are unique in that they’re embedded in their

particular cultural context, but make a career out of studying the past. Like an invisible pair of

glasses, their worldview and analytical abilities are shaped by micro-forces, such as, life

experiences, positionality, education, socio-economic status, and geographic location. At the

same time, macro-forces like a national political climate, popular culture, global conflict and

health of an economy find ways to influence our thinking. Historians perhaps produce their best

work when they understand how their identity influences their scholarship and, in turn, their

13

scholarship reflects the historical present. What makes historiography so valuable is the way

historians regularly reimagine methodological approaches to a topic.

Historians are continually asking themselves the question of significance. Why does my

work matter? What does it add that hasn’t already been said? Why would people care to read

yet another work on American higher education? Contemporary historians are apt to include

their own subjectivity in their analysis, noting that one’s identity can shape interpretation.

Howard Zinn made this point in his essay “Objections to Objectivity” in which he argues that,

“history could only be a way of understanding and helping to change what was wrong in the

world. That did not mean looking only for historical facts to reinforce the beliefs I already held.

It did not mean ignoring data that would change or complicate my understanding of society. It

meant asking questions that were important for social change, questions relating to equality,

liberty, peace, justice—but being open to whatever answers were suggested by looking at

history.”1 My identity shapes both my interest in this topic and my interpretation of the sources.

I am a white, Protestant male from a baby-blue-collar family. My father is a crane-service

technician, my grandfather worked at AK Steel for thirty years, and his father retired from

Champion Paper Mill. Accounting for inflation, chances are I’ll never earn more a year than my

grandfather — despite the fact that I’ll have a Ph.D. and he performed shiftwork in steel roll

bearing shop without a college degree.

Equally relevant in my interpretation is that the American economy is substantially

different from that of my father, his father, and his father. That history of economics is a

significant source of and influence on my interpretation as I explored the initial question of why

good-paying, industrial jobs have retracted from Southwest Ohio over the last fifty years. This

dissertation is thus rooted in my own experience of being raised in a working-class Ohio family

riddled with anxiety about a changing economic landscape. Also influential is that as I write this

dissertation, I have observed how national politics have exploited middle-America’s economic

hopelessness and fearful desperation for political gain.

I believe that higher education played a role in nearly every act of Ohio’s economic

decline since World War II, including the rusting of the industrial belt in ways that are far more

significant than historians, economists and journalists have initially thought. Both my personal

1 Howard Zinn, “Objections to Objectivity” in Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic

Historian (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 30.

14

experience and my scholarly research has brought me to this interpretation. I believe this

changing access to higher education fundamentally transformed the socio-economic fabric of the

state of Ohio. I believe that because of that history, socio-economic status continues to play an

outsized role in an individual’s ability to attend the college of their choice.

Historical Methodology and Policy Analysis

The most influential school of historical thought to my analysis is what Kate Rousmaniere calls

neo-revisionist historians, or neo-revisionist interpretation. The original neo-revisionist

historians were largely influenced by theorists like Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci who

often questioned how power worked and what characterized the relationship between the

oppressed and the powerful. As a result, neo-revisionist historians argued educational systems

were constructed on a dialectic of constraint and opportunity that often proved oppressive despite

the existence of avenues to socio-economic improvement. In other words, educational

institutions like higher education are systemically unequal because they are designed to favor

those with a higher socio-economic status and offer little reprieve for those from lower classes,

but the catch is that a college education is a near guaranteed way to improve one’s socio-

economic status.

Neo-revisionists are also noted for their desire to expose inequitable structures and

influence contemporary education reform initiatives. While historians agree on the importance

of constructing an accurate depiction of the past, they lose their harmony when it comes to the

question of significance. The extent to which historians use their research to influence

contemporary policy is both an ontological and methodological question. Some, like the

consensus historians, believed American education is a progressive march toward improvement,

focusing on equality and democracy.2 Since neo-revisionists believe American public schooling

has never upheld the promises of equality and democracy, their conclusions raise important

questions about the contemporary education landscape, such as, are we going to make the

necessary changes to make education more equitable? The purpose of this project, like the

purpose of any neo-revisionist history, is to make sense of the process that created Ohio’s

2 John Higham "Changing Paradigms: The Collapse of Consensus History," The Journal of

American History 76, no. 2 (1989): 460-66.

15

contemporary system of public higher education, what purpose, if any, influenced that system,

determine how that purpose changed over time, and suggest policy initiatives about the future of

Ohio’s public higher education.

Neo-revisionism is often influenced by Marxian economic thought, and there are

elements of Marxian theory that guided my analysis. One problem often overlooked by

historians of higher education is the definition of social class and how it lends understanding to

modern economic inequalities in institutions like colleges and universities. Class, whether it

refers to a group who share similar financial hardships, or to those who share a similar position

in an economic, social, or political structure, is an essential variable in understanding how

resources are distributed and who has access to those resources. What’s important to note is that

a person’s social class is just as powerful of an identity as their race, gender, age or sexual

preferences. The reason social class is being used as a theory of analysis in this project stems

largely from the fact that this study is dealing with an economic commodity — higher education

— and will be using Marx’s basic concept of class analysis.

Marx distinctly creates a class dichotomy between the working class and the master class

— those whose labor is exploited for little profit and those who own the means of production and

collect the profit, respectively.3 There is an inherent exploitative conflict between labor and

capital. The working class has to labor to create profit for the master class who then turns that

profit into capital for reinvestment. What’s happened over the last century, however, is the

development of the professional middle class — those who don’t own the means of production,

yet have the ability to barter for the price their labor receives, and distinctly don’t belong to the

working class. The basis of class differentiation between the working class and middle class is

the possession of skills or expertise. The more valuable a person’s skills, the less likely they are,

theoretically, to be victim or subject to an economically exploitative relationship. What’s most

interesting about a person’s skills is that they typically have to be learned. In the United States,

the way most Americans learn and perfect their skills are through the achievement of credentials

at an institution of higher education. Most people need the skills learned from a post-secondary

3 For more on Marx’s analysis of labor, class conflict and economic exploitation see David

Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2019); Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin

Press, 1993); John E. Roemer, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (Oxford:

Cambridge University Press, 1989).

16

institution, which then becomes a commodity they can use to build wealth through gainful

employment.

Above all else, this dissertation is a history of how policy decisions influenced social

institutions like higher education and the way those decisions impacted the lives of those who

sought higher education for a number of different reasons. The study of policy history aspires to

offer nothing less than the history of particular social structures, or the sum of the social

relationships between society’s many different groups. Due to the influence of Marxist thought,

race, gender, sex, occupation and age have all been included in historical policy analysis.

Historicizing the way policy decisions influence social institutions and the people interacting

with those institutions is also included in historical sociology, a subset of history that relies on

the concept of social mobility and often goes in direct opposition with the existing power

dynamics in a social structure.4 Therefore, historians who study political structures focus on

society’s marginalized populations and require the use of unique historical methods to produce

the necessary research. I rely on the work on historical sociologists to make sense of the

consequences society has to face because of policy decisions.

Since this dissertation is framed to examine how policy decisions influence social

structures, I’ve opted to use policy analysis as my approach. A sizeable portion of the primary

sources used for this dissertation are state documents, reports, budgets, and memoranda. These

documents carry a special weight of significance because unlike personal correspondence,

diaries, or newspaper articles they were produced by a governing body and enacted on the

public. In policy analysis, legitimacy is given to policymakers because they are elected to

democratic institutions that create and implement laws. Political historians focus their attention

on the short and long term economic effects of legislative policies.5 One of the most

consequential developments in historical policy analysis is the emergence of new theories that

4 Charles Tilly, "The Old New Social History and the New Old Social History," Review 7 (1984):

363-406; James Henretta, "Social History as Lived and Written," American Historical Review 84

(1979): 1293-1323; Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Denigrating the Rule of Reason: The 'New History'

Goes Bottoms Up," Harper's Magazine (1984): 84-90; Peter N. Stearns, "Social History Present

and Future," Journal of Social History 37 no. 1, (2003: 9-19.

5 Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith, eds., Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy

Coalition Approach (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); David Bryan Robertson, ed., Loss of

Confidence: Politics and Policy in the 1970s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 1998).

17

follow the theme of power relations — mostly between the state and citizens. One theory in

particular, elite theory, colored my analysis of Ohio’s system of public higher education.

Elite theory maintains that public policy is not determined by the demands and actions of

the electorate or the population-at-large, but is instead crafted by ruling elites who run

government in a way that benefits their economic and political interests.6 I argue that Ohio’s

leaders often acted in their best interest during the 1940s through the 1960s.

Economic Citizenship and Public Higher Education

Weaved throughout this dissertation is a narrative about access to public higher education in

Ohio. On the surface, gaining access to public higher education looks like a simple problem of

controlling the price of tuition and how close a person is to a campus, but the issue is much more

complex and ties directly into a subfield in economic history. It turns out the problem of access

to a public college or university also plays a role in an individual’s capacity to build economic

self-reliance and ability to participate in the economy. Having the opportunity to access higher

education became a key stepping stone for employment as the United States’ inched closer to the

21th century. That turned out to be particularly true in Ohio. By the 1980s, state leaders had

evidence that the income gap between those who have a post-secondary degree and those who

did not is larger than at any other point in Ohio’s history. Towards that end, Ohio’s leaders also

discovered a segment of the population was simply not participating in the economy and

attempted to use access to public higher education through state-supported initiatives as a way to

get people back into the workforce. Liz Cohen makes such an argument when she identifies the

term “economic citizenship” as a person’s ability to participate in the economy through

protections by federal or state law. Put in a different way, economic citizenship is a person’s

protected right to participate in economic institutions, like the labor force and economy. The

debate surrounding economic citizenship is about what responsibility the state has to ensure

every citizen is given the equal opportunity to participate in a nation’s economic structures, and

if such a responsibility exists, what are the necessary steps to provide that equal opportunity.

If there is one government-supported protection essential to an individual enjoying the

full right of their economic citizenship, it is the institution of education. By American state

6 Amitai Etzioni-Halévy, The Elite Connection: Problems and Potential in Western Democracy

(London: Polity Press, 1993).

18

law, every individual has the legal right to receive a free education from Kindergarten through

high school graduation. The argument of the state for providing such an education is that

education improves the nation’s economy.7

The rapid, unprecedented growth of spending, consumption, and disposable income that

accelerated in the period between the two World Wars and again immediately after World War II

ushered in a new idea of citizenship that included political as well as economic rights.8

Historical studies of economic citizenship illustrate how economics, politics, and culture were

interwoven in the nation’s history in this period. 9 Most historians agree that the birth and

maturation of consumer culture took place between 1950 and 1970 when citizens — fueled by

encouragement from the federal government — began to see the freedom of choice as an

economic activity that should be protected under the right of U.S. citizenship.10

Of particular interest in this period is the development of a modern form of class

identification. Prior to the 1930s, Americans did not place themselves within a stratified socio-

economic structure, due largely to the fact that America really only had two classes — rich and

poor .11 The rhetoric of the New Deal coupled with the growth of big business and liberal

economic policy furthered the Keynesian idea that spending created jobs and national economic

prosperity.12 The influence of Keynesian economic theory — and its emphasis on high wages,

full employment, and high production — created an economically-based socio-political

relationship that became a fabric of American culture. In other words, citizens needed to spend

to keep the economy going and state government had to invest in the economy to ensure

productivity during a downturn. Ohio’s leaders struggled to keep up with this concept. By mid-

7 Jan Eberly and Carmel Martin, The Economics of Higher Education (Washington D.C.: United

States Department of Treasury, 2012).

https://www.treasury.gov/connect/blog/Documents/20121212_Economics%20of%20Higher%20

Ed_vFINAL.pdf.

8 Liz Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

(New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 9 Alice Kessler-Harris, “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” Social Politics 10, no. 2 (2003):

158-174.

10 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

11 Herbert J. Gans, Middle American Individualism: Political Participation and Liberal

Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

12 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York:

Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

19

century, Americans had developed a middle class which Burton Bledstein and Robert Johnston

describe as inclusive of economic benefits like “personal financial security, an opportunity to

accumulate assets, access to good schools and increasingly high levels of education, skilled work

in upwardly mobile careers, a safe environment in which to live and raise a family, health

insurance, material possessions to make life more convenient and comfortable, room for personal

adventure, self-expression, and a spiritual life.”13

As the middle-class developed in the mid-20th century, social commentators criticized

what they interpreted as the middle-class’ lack of community responsibility and civic duty. In

the 1950s, scholars argued that middle class Americans were narcissistic, individualistic and

anti-democratic. At the same time, business leaders applauded the middle class for making

better individualistic, consumerist decisions that would help the economy — something the

middle class hadn’t done since before the Great Depression.14 These attacks against the middle

class reveal an anxiety about the changing character of American citizenship after World War II.

The rise of individualism, consumerism, private gain, economic prosperity, and rational

selfishness were seen as being collectively devastating to American ideals of public good and

democratic pluralism. American citizens and government officials embraced the idea of middle

class prosperity.

Liz Cohen explains that the rise of middle class consumerism was interwoven with the

way in which economic citizenship transformed the United States’ definition of citizenship after

World War II because of the growing need to prove America’s economic and political

dominance over the Soviet Union. Cohen argues that the economic crisis of the Great

Depression and the employment shortage during World War II created the citizen consumer, but

the Cold War exacerbated the notion of economic citizenship through the rapid development of a

middle class with disposable income. As the Soviet Union became the singular threat to the

United States — as well as capitalism and democracy, according to the American government —

13 Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the

History of the American Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2.

14 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle

Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). William H. Whyte, The Organization Man

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); Christopher Lynch, The Culture of Narcissism:

American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).

20

consumers began carrying an obligation to safeguard the economy. Cohen argues that citizen

consumers were encouraged by American businesses to see themselves as “responsible for

safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the

rights” of the individual citizen and their interaction with the marketplace.15 America, and Ohio

in particular, largely operated as a traditional agricultural economy until roughly 1920, spent less

than one decade experiencing rapid growth towards our contemporary market economy, then

dealt with nearly twenty years of government intervention, price regulation, and limited access to

consumer goods. After World War II, the federal government had the ability to protect against

inflation, the average American made a salary above the poverty line, and a ridiculously large

industrial and manufacturing sector upheld economic growth alongside a budding service and

knowledge industry.16 Until this point, Ohio seemed to be following the national trend of

economic prosperity.

The economic recovery after a decade and a half of depression and war depended on

Americans earning good-paying jobs and spending their disposable income to bolster the state

and national economy. Americans eventually made more money through a growing professional

and globalized economy, but some states like Ohio did not see the same gains in their economy,

which would eventually cause job loss and stagnant wages. Students around the nation entering

colleges and universities in the years following World War II were the catalyst for the wave of

change that swept through American definitions of citizenship, consumption and employment.

Prompted by a fundamental transformation of the United States economy, pre-professional

training and specialization molded public higher education into an incubator for job training,

research development and middle-class occupation.17 The states that didn’t invest in public

higher education had trouble keeping up with the economic transformation.

While students poured into college classrooms to receive an education suited to their

occupational aspiration, in the 1950s, the purpose of a college education in the United States had

a new requirement. The federal government and leading universities declared a need for students

to use their education to uphold the economy, be good citizens and produce knowledge to fight

15 Cohen, A Consumers Republic, 10.

16 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 148.

17 Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development

of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton Press, 1976).

21

the Cold War.18 Despite the fact that students had more control over their academic experience,

the purpose of American higher education was educating students with professional skills so they

can enter the workforce and be an economic citizen.

Most public colleges and universities in the United States reacted to the new purpose of

higher education by reforming to accommodate new subjects in the social sciences, humanities

and natural sciences through required general education courses. A number of these changes

stemmed directly from Harvard University’s 1945 report about the need for required general

education courses, the “Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society.”

The report’s author, Harvard’s President James Bryant Conant argued that required “general

education,” is an “education in a common heritage and toward a common citizenship” that

creates an “increased skill in analysis and expression, in the capacity to deal with general ideas

and to make and defend value-judgments.”19 As early as 1950, the distinction between public

and private, university and college, liberal arts and pre-professional training curriculums became

blurred as higher education came to adopt general education programs. According to one

researcher writing in the mid-1965, academic programs in American higher education in 1950s

started to encompass “the greatest possible variety of subject maters.”20 As a result, the newly

developed curriculum in American higher education was nearly universal and focused on helping

students understand and solve problems in the contemporary world that combined “vocational

preparation with the knowledge of social foundations from the vantage of point of multiple

perspectives.”21

Although higher education focused more on educating students with professional skills so

they could enter the workforce and be an economic citizen, outside factors limited the number of

18 Clark Kerr, The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960-1980 (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1991); Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, American

Education: A History (New York: Routledge, 2009); Frederick Rudolph, The American College

and University: A History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Clark Kerr, The Uses of

the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Derek Bok, Higher Education in

America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

19 James Bryant Conant, General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1952), 47, 198.

20 Logan Wilson, Emerging Patterns in American Higher Education (Washington D.C.:

American Council on Education, 1965), 46. 21 Willis Rudy, The Evolving Liberal Arts Curriculum; A Historical Review of the Basic Themes

(New York: Institute of Higher Education,1960), 38.

22

students who could access a college or university. Historian Andrew Hurley argues that

Americans in the 1950s, spent money on things like higher education in order to identify with a

certain socio-economic class, but the number of Americans who could afford higher education

was quite small. In other words, Americans began spending money on higher education in the

1950s and 1960s because a college degree was a path to economic citizenship. The lack of

access to higher education for others led to poverty, mostly notable in housing differentials and

the type of type of job they could work.22

Improved housing and access to colleges worked as vehicles to integrate some white

working-class families into the growing middle class that came to define economic citizenship

— an idea Hurley believes is the true meaning of the “American Dream.” 23 But access to

consumer culture and the middle-class was denied to other populations, specifically African

Americans. The result of this economic and cultural change in the post-war era was that some

citizens were not being able to participate in the economy. Hurley argues that the economic

fragmentation and inequalities caused by unequal access of economic citizenship in the 1950s

was most noticeable in the decreasing access that the working poor had to housing and higher

education. Hurley argues that in the years after the second world war, Americans spent money

on things like higher education in order to identify with a certain socio-economic class. In other

words, Americans began spending money on higher education in the 1950s and 1960s because a

college degree was a path to the middle-class. While higher education offered access to the

middle class for some, the lack of access to higher education for others led to poverty, most

notable in housing differentials.24 Many colleges and universities still effectively discouraged

enrollment to Black students as late as the 1960s and plenty of employers were equally earnest in

their attempt to not hire Black workers. Ohio’s Black population experienced continued racial

inequality as state leaders largely ignored their well-being until the late-1970s.

22 Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in

the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 9.

23 Ibid., xv.

24 Ibid., 9.

23

A Historiography of American Higher Education

The history of American higher education tends to be written as individual institutional or

collective histories that emphasize Ivy League colleges and other elite institutions.25 These

institutional narratives rarely address larger economic, policy dimensions, or contemporary

public institutions not located on the East or West Coast.26 There are also only a few state-wide

studies of the development of higher education, but most are either half a century old,

commissioned by the state government, or focus on the state-supported institutions of

California.27 Nonetheless, several historians have made substantial strides in furthering our

understanding of the relationship between higher education and the state in the decades

following World War II and this work significantly framed my study of Ohio higher education

by providing clarified terms, debating the distinction between what makes an institution ‘public’

or ‘private,’ and arguing over how American higher education became a multipurpose institution

offering both democratic access and prestigious research in a number of fields.28

25 Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1970); John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A

History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Roger L. Geiger, The History of American

Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2014).

26 That is not to say all institutional histories aren’t good. Some, like James Axtell’s The Making

of Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the Present, do a fine job of dealing with the

complex nature of nationwide issues like anti-Semitism, statewide figures like future-President

of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, while focusing their studying within a bounded place

like Princeton University. 27 Saul Sack, History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania

Historical and Museum Commission, 1963); James Albert Woodburn, Higher Education in

Indiana (Washington: G.P.O., 1891); George Gary Bush, History of Higher Education in

Massachusetts (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891); William S. Powell, Higher

Education in North Carolina (Raleigh: State Dept. of Archives and History, 1970); David

Gardner and Ann Lage. A Life in Higher Education: Fifteenth President of the University of

California, 1983-1992 (Berkeley, Calif: Regents of the University of California, 1997); Cristina

Gonzalez, Clark Kerr's University of California: Leadership, Diversity, and Planning in Higher

Education. 2017.

http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781351528283; Maresi

Nerad, The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of

California, Berkeley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);

28 For those interested in reading more about the development of, and purpose for American

higher education, Bernard Bailyn’s Education in the Forming of American Society, Laurence

Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University, Lawrence A. Cremin’s American

24

Other historians’ contributions to various aspects of American higher education include

Roger Geiger’s continued work on the research university’s role in the development of the

modern American research university.29 Other historians have been critical of the research

university’s over-extension.30 Other historians have studied the relationship between public

policy and higher education, although more needs to be done to better understand the influence

of a state’s economic policy on the purpose of public higher education and the exact role of the

federal government in higher education finance. 31 Some contemporary studies in this topic can

contribute to the historical analysis.32 There is a long tradition of historians weaving the

narrative of higher education into the American political, economic and social history. In many

ways, higher education serves as a catalyst to study particular moments in United States’ history,

such as anti-intellectualism, McCarthyism, and Racial politics.33

Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876, Frederick Rupolph’s The American College

and University: A History, and John R. Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education are

excellent places to begin.

29 Roger Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Higher Education Research

Universities, 1900-1940 (New York: Routledge, 2017) and Research and Relevant Knowledge:

American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Routledge, 2017).

30 Michael J. Luger and Harvey Goldstein, Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and

Regional Economic Development (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

31 Roger Williams, The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton

and the Land-Grant College Movement (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press,

1991), Chester E. Finn Jr., Scholars, Dollars, and Bureaucrats (Washington, D.C.: Brookings

Institute, 1978), and Julie A. Rueben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual

Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1996).

32 Ronald Ehrenberg, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2002) and Charles Clotfelter, Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher

Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016); Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the

Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2017), Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, Paying for

the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015),

Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education

in the 20th Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), and Barrett J. Taylor and

Brendan Cantwell’s Unequal Higher Education: Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019). 33 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1996);

Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1986), Stefan M. Bradley, Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black

Power, and the League (New York: New York University Press, 2018), and Shelia M. Katz,

25

The history of access to higher education highlights an often piece of postwar higher

education: the community college and other two-year institutions. Philo Hutcheson, a historian

of community colleges, has argued that, “In general, historians of higher education have paid

little, if any, attention to the community college.”34 35 Yet community colleges and branch

campuses enrollments enroll more than 34 percent of all students and nearly 50 percent of all

first-year postsecondary students.36 More than 50 of all four-year degree holders who graduated

in the last ten years were once enrolled at a two-year college.37 In 1999, the National Center for

Education Statistics reported that four-year colleges enrolled roughly 6 million students, while

two-year campuses enrolled 5.3 million students.38 Two-year campuses have grown faster than

54-year institutions in the last 50 years. In 1965, only 26 percent of all college students attended

two-year campuses for a total of one million students; yet less than forty-years later, two-year

campuses witnessed a 413 percent increase in their enrollment and outpaced the enrollment at

four-year campuses by nearly 300 percent.39 Thus, as Hutcheson argues, community colleges

Reformed American Dreams: Welfare Mothers, Higher Education, and Activism Opportunity

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019). 34 Philo A. Hutcheson, "Reconsidering the Community College," History of Education

Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1999): 307. Here is a list of the works referenced by Hutcheson: Robert T.

Pedersen, "Value Conflict on Community College Campus: An Examination of Its Historical

Origins," Managing Community and Junior Colleges: Perspectives for the Next Century, ed. by

Allan M. Hoffman and Daniel J. Julius (Washington, D.C.: College and University Personnel

Association, 1993), and Robert Pedersen, "The St. Louis Conference: The Junior College

Movement Reborn," Community College Journal 65, no. 5 (April-May 1995): 26-30; Steven G.

Katsinas, "George C. Wallace and the Founding of Alabama's Public Two- Year Colleges,"

Journal of Higher Education 65, no. 4 (July/August 1994): 447-472; and John H. Frye, The

Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900-1940: Professional Goals and Popular Aspirations

(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992).

35 See J.M. Beach, Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United

States (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2011) and Robert Patrick Pedersen, “The Origins and

Development of the Early Public Junior College: 1900-1940,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,

2000).

36 Community College Research Center, Teacher’s College “Community College Enrollment and

Completion,”, Columbia University, 2020. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Community-College-

FAQs.html.

37 National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, “Two-Year Contributions to Four-Year

Completions – 2017,”, March 29, 2017. https://nscresearchcenter.org/snapshotreport-

twoyearcontributionfouryearcompletions26/.

38 Henry T. Kasper, “The Changing Role of Community College,” Occupational Outlook

Quarterly 1, no. 18 (2002): 15.

39 Ibid., 17.

26

and other two-year institutions are equally crucial to the historical narrative of American higher

education as are 4-year colleges, particularly after World War II.

In the last two decades, however, community colleges and research universities have

received attention from more than historians. In particular, sociologists have used historical

methodology to study the issues of class, race, equal opportunity and hegemony within the

context of American higher education in an attempt to better understand how systemic

disadvantage is historically rooted in the walls of colleges and universities. Sociologists have

also turned their attention to socio-economic status, which is usually measured by determining

education, income, occupation, or a composite of these dimensions and indicates an individual’s

access to collectively desired resources, such as, educational opportunities, material goods,

income, careers, or income. Sociologists and historians have also studied the resulting economic

stratification created by the American higher education hierarchy that spans from community

colleges at the bottom to elite, top-tier private institutions at the apex.40 For example,

sociologists Amy Stitch and Carrie Freie use an historical approach to describe how the "college-

for-all" concept has grown more pervasive because systems of higher education have become

increasingly stratified by social class, which has inherently relegated working class students to

lower-tier public institutions.41

The work of historical sociologists is fundamental to understanding how socio-economic

status became a polarizing issue in higher education and how a class hierarchy was created

through that institution.42 Many of these scholars looking at socio-economic inequality in higher

education analyze the motives of state and national policy makers vis-à-vis the construction of

contemporary systems of higher education. For example, Joel and Eric Best’s 2014 study, The

Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion Dollar Problem, historically root

today’s student loan crisis in ill-guided government policies that allowed working-class students

41Amy E. Stitch & Carrie Freie (eds.), The Working Classes and Higher Education: Inequality of

Access, Opportunity and Outcome (New York: Routledge University Press, 2017).

42 Howard R. Bowen and Cameron Fincher, Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social

Value of American Higher Education (New York: Routledge Press, 2017); Century Foundation

Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal, Bridging

the Higher Education Divide: Strengthening Community Colleges and Restoring the American

Dream: The Report of the Century Foundation Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges

from Becoming Separate and Unequal (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2013.

27

to take on crippling debt for the opportunity to attend colleges out of their price range, which

ultimately left millions of students in a worse financial position after college than before they

enrolled.43

Perhaps the most influential book to the framing of this dissertation is Steven Brint and

Jerome Karabel’s The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational

Opportunity in America, 1900-1985. Brint and Karabel maintain that two-year institutions like

community college have failed to serve their purpose. Instead of being a powerful democratic

tool for those seeking to move beyond their class or marginalized status — namely women, the

working class and people of color — community college became an institution that largely

diverted people away from elite and four-year institutions. What’s more, the authors argue that

four-year institutions and powerful elites have used community colleges as a buffer that sorts

students into a vocational career path or diverts students away a bachelor’s degree.44 “Poised

between a burgeoning system of secondary education and a highly stratified structure of

economic opportunity,” write Brint and Karabel, community colleges were “located at the very

point where the aspirations generated by American democracy clashed head on with the realities

of its class structure.”45 Their argument is a necessary starting point for historians who want to

study what purposes state policymakers had in mind when they crafted two-year institutions.

Despite the pioneering work of sociologists and sociological historians like Brint and

Karabel, a gap still remains in the historiography of American higher education as it relates to

socio-economic stratification, policymaking vis-à-vis economic development, and higher

education’s dual focus on both prestige and accessibility. Scholars have yet to produce an

historical analysis of higher education at the state level. While some historians have studied why

and how some public universities made it to the pinnacle of American academic excellence,

there is no historical explanation for why and how some state systems of public higher education

came to be both elite and accessible. Historians of higher education have yet to study how, or

why, some individual public institutions or entire state systems of higher education balanced

universal access and academic excellence.

43 Joel Best and Eric Best, The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion

Dollar Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

44 Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream, 9.

45 Ibid.

28

According to John Thelin, an institution is considered ‘public’ if a college petitioned “a

state legislature for some funding,” which makes the answer seem rooted in financial

dependence.46 However, this is not always the case, especially if a state legislature grants a

college charter to a private party. America’s first colleges were considered ‘private’ because they

were charted by a private family, and, due to the 1819 case of Dartmouth College V. Woodward,

were protected by rule of law against state meddling despite a state legislature granting the

charter.47 In other words, a state may have chartered a college, but the college and those running

the institution become private entities free from any state interference — except in cases where

the college breaks a public statue, or law.48 And so, a ‘private’ institution is considered private

in so far as they don’t break laws, thus inviting state intervention. On the other hand, an

institution is considered ‘public’ if it is charted by the state, provided a portion of funding by the

state, and the state has a hand in the institution’s governance. The distinction is narrow yet

important.

Distinct to public universities is the state’s ability to influence various elements of that

institution’s size and purpose. Many historians of American higher education note that the

relationship between the government — both state and federal — and public universities

underwent a fundamental transformation after World War II that resulted in the contemporary

public research university.49 The relationship between government and public higher education

would have been difficult to achieve with private institutions due to the longstanding legal

precedent against state interference. Public universities, however, were perfectly situated to turn

state funding and research mandates into tangible benefits that would serve both the academics at

46 Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, 72.

47 "Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward," Oyez, Accessed November 11, 2019.

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/17us518.

48 Ibid; Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, 73. 49 For more on the development and growth of the public research university, see Roger L.

Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of the American Research Universities, 1900-1940

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant

Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1993); Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Prominence, Its

Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (New York: Perseus, 2009); Hugh Davis

Graham and Nancy Diamond, The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and

Challengers in the Postwar Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005): Bruce

Hevly and Peter Galison, ed., Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1992).

29

the institution and the goals of the state. Or, as one historian of American higher education

argues, state public universities provided a breeding ground for “a rich mix of intermediary

organizations, still anchored by state- and local-level government but joined by interest groups,

professional-voluntary association, and the private sector” for the federal government “to

regulate the economy, defend the homeland, and deliver goods and services to the American

people.”50

Some historians of American higher education argue that the fervor amongst higher

education leaders in the post-war era to achieve excellence in research and establish prestigious

graduate programs coincided with an effort to expand access to undergraduate education. The

decision to push public colleges and universities towards universal access was born more out of

necessity than a commitment to democracy in education. According to John Thelin, the

population of the eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old age cohort hit a historic high during the 1960s

and a considerable portion of this age group sought access to higher education, which left

institutions little choice other than to expand and accommodate.51 Roger Geiger built upon

Thelin’s conclusions by arguing that increased high school graduation rates, the economic need

for a more educated workforce, parents’ interest that their children have improved career

prospects and the growth of family incomes furthered the popular pressure for expanded higher

education enrollment in the years after the Second World War.52 David Labaree contends that

the increased demand for higher education in this period stemmed from a combination of

individuals desiring an enhanced social position and college being perceived as one of the only

ways to raise social status.53

Labaree also addresses the physical growth of public institutions in the decades following

World War II. Most state-funded public universities established branch campuses, and state

legislatures chartered two-year institutions that focused on lower-division baccalaureate courses,

technical education, or certification programs. Labaree is particularly interested in why two-year

public institutions were built in favor of expanding four-year publics institutions and how the

expansion hid inequality under the guise of democratic intentions. Rather than admitting

50 Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 2, 3.

51 Thelin, “A History of American Higher Education,” 300.

52 Roger L. Geiger, American Higher Education Since World War II: A History (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2019), 133. 53 David F. Labaree, A Perfect Mess. 95, 106.

30

students to established, reputable public and private institutions, Labree argues that “the higher

education system created a series of new lower-level institutions to make room for the influx,

leaving the college’s core middle-class constituency safely protected in institutions that, instead

of becoming more accessible in the face of greater demand, chose to become more exclusive.”54

In essence, Labaree argues that higher education expanded to provide greater access in a way

that furthered social and economic stratification. Any American could go to college — just not

necessarily the college they want to attend. This process of stratification through diversified

higher education options played out in Ohio in the decades after World War II.

54 Ibid., 106.

31

CHAPTER THREE

PANIC, PAUSE, AND PURPOSE IN OHIO HIGHER EDUCATION

Introduction

The state of Ohio’s contemporary system of public higher education is both unique and

emblematic. On the surface, it seems the recent history of Ohio public higher education is a

familiar story played out in other states. Like most states east of the Mississippi River, Ohio is

home to research universities that house dozens of graduate programs. Like most states in the

Midwest, Ohio benefited from the Morrill Land Grant Acts, which created colleges for the

benefit of agriculture and mechanical arts. And, like most states across the nation, Ohio’s baby

boom population came of age looking to enter higher education during the 1960s and early-

1970s.

What distinguishes Ohio’s system of public higher education is not what state leaders

initially accomplished but rather what they failed to do. The Regents had a plan that faced

numerous roadblocks in the late-1960s and early-1970s — caused, in large part, by Governor Jim

Rhodes’ ever-changing political ideology that derailed policy makers’ long-term goals for Ohio

public higher education. It took Ohio’s leaders more than twenty years, a critical period

spanning from 1943 to 1966, to organize and implement a state policy to invest in public higher

education. By 1966, a new governing body, the Board of Regents, became responsible for

development of Ohio higher education.

The Regents initially focused on creating a system that prioritized two competing, but

somewhat complimentary goals: open access at state-supported two-year branch campuses that

emphasized general education for underclassmen and the construction of research-based graduate

programs in science and technology at state-supported four-year institutions where focus would

be on upperclassmen education — a model they called the Master Plan for Ohio Higher

Education. New two-year campuses would give the state much needed space for the massive

wave of Baby Boomers looking to enter higher education while the graduate programs and

32

research facilities would provide an opportunity for economic development away from industrial

manufacturing.

The Regents’ plan seemed to be working quite well and enjoyed support from the

General Assembly and Governor Rhodes, who personally endorsed the Regent’s model for

public higher education. But then, in 1969, a mere three years into carrying out their Master

Plan, Governor Rhodes, who was elected in 1962 as a pro-New Deal, Eisenhower Republican,

began campaigning against the Regents’ Master Plan and turned Ohio’s campuses into his

political punching bag in attempt to win over the burgeoning “Law and Order” Republicans who

blamed the anti-Vietnam War, pro-speech, Civil Rights Movement protests of the late-1960s on

higher education. As a result, the push for graduate education and economic diversification

through research and development was replaced with Rhodes’ desire for a state investment in

two-year vocational training.

Behind the nearly thirty-year story of how Ohio’s leaders handled the development of

public higher education after World War II is an important narrative that explains the state’s

initial hesitancy about investing in public higher education and Rhodes’ eventual distaste for

graduate education: the deindustrialization of the American Midwest. There isn’t one singular

piece of evidence that connects the economic phenomena of deindustrialization to the decisions

Ohio policymakers made about public higher education, but there are enough clues to suggest

that a good number of state leaders knew Ohio’s economic dependence on industrial

manufacturing was not a healthy long-term plan for the state. As such, Ohio policymakers made

their decisions about public higher education because of, and, in some cases, in spite of, Ohio’s

identity as an industrial manufacturing state. A quick overview of the Midwest and Ohio in the

years immediately following World War II illustrates how the state’s economic identity

influenced the way Ohio policymakers viewed the purpose of public higher education and how,

as the economy changed over the next three decades, so too did their views.

This chapter seeks to accomplish three inter-related goals. First, it will establish the

economic and political conditions of Ohio in the immediate years preceding World War II and

explain how those conditions were related to the overall socio-economic culture of the Midwest

before, during and after World War II. Second, this chapter will examine how the economic

policies that benefited Ohio and the Midwest during World War II gave way to a new, post-War

economic order where the federal government prioritized research and development in aerospace

33

and technology through relationships with states and their systems of public higher education

that created new industries in the private sector. Once this new economic order became a reality,

Ohio’s leaders had little time to develop a plan that would earn the state a piece of the federal

government’s research funding.

Third, and most importantly, this chapter will argue that political ideology and economic

anxieties about industrial manufacturing gained an outsized influence in determining the purpose

of public higher education in the decades following World War II. High-ranking politicians,

especially Jim Rhodes, exploited those anxieties for political gain at the expense of reaching the

Regent’s goals for public higher education. Taken together, the story of Ohio public higher

education from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s is a gateway to understanding how three

significant events of the twentieth century — deindustrialization, the explosive growth of

American public higher education, and the rise of the New Right after the end of the New Deal

coalition — are all inter-related and vied to implement their vision, and purpose of, public higher

education.

Ohio and the Midwest: An Economic Overview, 1938-1943

The clearest picture of what happened to the strength of industrial manufacturing in the Midwest

involves the transformation of the American South as well as the economic development of the

American West, which was caused, in large part, by the federal government’s investment in both

regions during, and immediately after, World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt announced

in 1938 that the United States’ South was “the nation’s number one economic problem — the

nation’s problem, not merely the South’s.”1 At the time, the Midwest’s leading manufacturers,

industrialists and laborers could not have imagined that Roosevelt’s declaration would play an

outsized role in the Midwest’s eventual economic woes. Yet, the federal government’s New

Deal commitment to help the South would continue through the 1960s and beyond.2 The sudden

1 Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and

the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 12.

2 Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 90; Robert E. Gallman, "Commodity Output, 1839-

1899," in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, Studies in Income and

Wealth, no. 24 (Princeton, 1960), 2; Albert Fishlow, "Productivity and Technological Change in

the Railroad Sector, 1840-1910," in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States

After 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, (New York, 1966), table 1, 585; Margaret Walsh, The

34

change in the South’s economy was so noticeable that, in 1956, the famed Southern writer

William Faulkner lamented, “Our economy is no longer agricultural, it is the Federal

Government.”3

But how did World War II federal spending help Midwestern states? For a brief period,

everything about the war was a boon to the Midwest’s economy, particularly in East North

Central Midwestern states like Ohio. One of the most effective ways to understand exactly what

World War II meant to Midwestern industrial manufacturing is to zero in on the economic

production of Ohio during the war. In 1941 the state’s main industries — agriculture and

manufacturing — went into hyper-production. Farm income increased by nearly 200 percent

while industry wages became the highest in the nation.4 Ohio’s industries employed 754,886

workers in 1941, but the increase in wages brought migrant workers from all over the Midwest

and South, raising the total number of workers to 1,268,685 by 1944. Most lucrative to Ohio’s

economy, however, were federal defense contracts. Ohio ranked fourth in the amount of money

received from federal government, with no less than $2 billion going to both Akron and Dayton

and a staggering $5 billion to Cleveland alone to aid the production of synthetic rubber and

airplanes to aid the war effort.5

During the race to create a synthetic rubber, the federal government introduced Ohio’s

leaders and citizens to a new model of economic development involving industry, corporations,

and the research university. Known as the Synthetic Rubber Program, the federal government

gathered military leaders, scientists, industrial managers, and government officials at the

University of Akron to develop a rubber that could keep the war effort moving since the

Japanese had systematically taken control of raw rubber production.6 At the time, state business

Manufacturing Frontier (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Daniel Nelson, Farm

and Factory: Workers in the Midwest, 1880-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1995); Viken Tchakerian, "Productivity, Extent of Markets, and Manufacturing in the Late

Antebellum South and Midwest." The Journal of Economic History 54, no. 3 (1994): 497-525.

3 Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American culture, Society, and Politics

(Boston: Da Capo Press, 2002), 112.

4 Harry Schwartz, "Hired Farm Labor in World War II," Journal of Farm Economics 24, no. 4

(1942): 826-44.

5 Kevin F. Kern and Gregory S. Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State, 390.

6 Peter J. T. Morris, The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 46-62.

35

and government leaders didn’t know just how much the Synthetic Rubber Program

foreshadowed American postwar economic development.7

Resisting a New Direction: Ohio’s Debate Over a Postwar Economy, 1943-1957

John Bricker, Ohio’s Republican Governor from 1939 till 1945, looked forward to the day when

the state was free from the federal government’s bureaucratic oversight and state policymakers

were again in charge. “The individual citizen must again be conscious of his responsibility to his

government,” said Bricker, “and alert to the preservation of his rights as a citizen under it. This

cannot be done by taking government further away but by keeping it at home.” On another

occasion, Bricker told an audience that “The paternalism of the New Deal has weakened the old

homely virtues of initiative and self-reliance…We have been led to believe we can do very little

to help ourselves.”8 According to Bricker, any assistance from the federal government merely

meant less personal responsibility, and although Americans today perhaps don’t take as much

issue with the federal government funding university-based research for civil defense,

aeronautics and medicine, that was not always the case for Americans living in the 1930s and

1940s.

It’s easy to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Ohio’s political leaders for not

wanting federal assistance. For one thing, few state legislators had reason to worry that the end

of postwar federal investment would hurt the state’s economy. In 1953 the nation’s average

income hovered near $1,800 while Ohio’s average income topped $2,000, which gave the state a

higher standard of living than some industrialized nations like Great Britain, Canada and

Sweden.9 Nearly all of the East North Central states shared Ohio’s good economic fortune

because of their industrial economies, high levels of employment, and early participation in the

nation’s space program.10 But what about the future? Such a question lingered in the mind of

not only state policymakers, but business leaders and citizens as well. If the end of war was

7 Vernon Herbert and Attilio Bisio, Synthetic Rubber: A Project That Had to Succeed (Westport,

Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985), i-vii.

8 Richard O. Davies, Defender of the Old Guard: John Bricker and American Politics

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 51, 53.

9 See: Jon K. Lauck, Gleaves Whitney, Joseph Hogan, eds., Finding a New Midwestern History

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

10 Kern and Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State, 399.

36

inevitable, so too was the end of heightened wartime production. Therefore, planning for the

transition to a peacetime economy was necessary to prevent the state’s economy falling into a

recession. Governor Bricker did not see a recession on the horizon, but still signed the bill to

create the Ohio Post-War Program Commission to study postwar economic options.11

Led by state policymakers, the Post-War Program Commission was instructed to

complete three vague tasks. First, the Commission needed to gather all available pertinent data

relative to “post-war problems which will confront the state and its inhabitants.”12 Second, the

Commission needed to determine “how, and to what extent, the state can help restore” returning

veterans into the economy.13 Finally, the Commission should “do such other things as may be

pertinent to the post-war effort of the state of Ohio.”14 The final report took nearly three years to

complete. The Post-War Commission’s report argued that the state should finance projects to

stop beach erosion, build public libraries, and erect dozens of new state parks.15 One of the

report’s findings eventually involved higher education and the Inter-University Council (IUC),

which was an organization of six public university presidents founded in to protect their interests

with the Ohio General Assembly, had sidestepped a national recommendation from the

American Council on Education to create a statewide system of two-year community colleges

because they believed two-year colleges were “dangerous to the future welfare of state-supported

institutions of higher learning.”16

Another of the report’s consequences was the creation of the ‘Science Committee,’ which

was an offshoot of a wartime committee, known as the Cyclotron Committee that was created to

do the same thing: study how the state could invest in new economic industries. In a 1944 report

to the 96th General Assembly, the Cyclotron Committee argued that the window for Ohio to

build a cyclotron facility, which uses machines to produced charged particles that can be used in

medical, industrial and nuclear research, to aid in the war effort had passed, but the state needed

to “take leadership in this type of post-war development” because cyclotron research could

11 Karl B. Pauly, Bricker of Ohio: The Man and His Record (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons,

1944), 91-96.

12 Michael Desmond, ed., Ohio Post-War Program Commission: Committee Organization

Preliminary Research (The F.J. Heer Co.: Columbus, OH, 1946), 2.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 29. 16 Ibid., 358.

37

produce products “that will form the basis for vast new industry, providing substantial

employment in the future.”17 The Science Committee reached the same conclusions in 1947.

They told the General Assembly that “research and creative ventures, which provide for the

development of our scientific, technical, and human resources, has received little financial

support from the State or municipalities,” and the state’s relatively little “stockpile of scientific

knowledge is not sufficient for our present and future purposes.”18 Moreover, the Science

Committee believed that the General Assembly should “invest funds in research and in the

application of new knowledge in the interest and general welfare of its citizens” because of their

“importance in the world of tomorrow to Ohio’s industries and Ohio’s seven million citizens.”19

The Science Committee’s recommendations were flatly ignored by the General Assembly and

the idea was shelved for more than ten years, a decision that went against national trends.

The Rise of the American and Ohio Higher Education, 1957-1962

Although it wasn’t entirely unexpected, the Cold War fundamentally adjusted the United States’

economic and political agenda for much of the three decades following World War II. And that

agenda had an outsized effect on the future of American public higher education. The desire for

scientific advancements in aerospace and other similar technological areas to compete against the

Soviet Union and contain the spread of Communism sent the federal government on spending

spree. In order to achieve dominance over the Soviet Union, the federal government fell back on

the successful wartime formula perfected during World War II: fostering a strong economic

connection between military contracts, job growth, research and development, and a highly-

skilled workforce. Wartime investment in new plants and additions to existing facilities were

concentrated in certain states, especially in the South. For example, almost two-thirds of the

total investment of $4.2 billion in structures and equipment was invested in just four states:

17 Ohio Looks Ahead: General Report of the Ohio Post-War Program Commission to the 96th

General Assembly and the Governor, 1943-1944, (Columbus: F.J. Heer Printing Company,

1945), 48.

18 Michael Desmond, ed., The Ohio Post-War Program Commission: Biennial Report to the

Governor and the 97th General Assembly (Columbus: The Ohio Post-War Program Commission,

1947), 99-100.

19 Ibid., 100.

38

Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. Texas alone accounted for almost a third of the

region's total.20

The bulk of federal spending for research and development eventually went towards

development for military defense and the budding space program, which created a new, lucrative

market in post-war America: the aeronautics industry. Adjusting for inflation, total research and

development spending grew by 200 percent between 1955 and 1965. By 1960 some 70 percent

of the nation’s entire research effort now came from federal funding.21 Outlays for research had

grown from 5 percent to 15 percent of the federal budget and the bulk of funds went to research

facilities located on college campuses. In states such as California, approximately 50 percent of

the state’s economic growth from 1945 to 1960 was tied directly and indirectly to the defense

industry and federal outlays for research that simultaneously expanded — and brought national

acclaim to the state’s university system.22

Back in Ohio, state leaders watched as the rise in the South and West’s economic

prosperity nearly mirrored the Midwest’s slow economic dissent. In 1955, members of the state-

funded Industrial Development Committee (IDC) studied what the state could do to reinforce

their economy and prevent manufactures from leaving the state for the South. In the ten years

since World War II ended, manufactures had gradually left the state to open new plants in

Pennsylvania, California, and Georgia.23 Two economists from The Ohio State, Paul G. Craig

and James Yocum, were enlisted to help the Commerce Committee figure out the specific

20 Byron Fairchild and Jonathan Grossman, The Army and Industrial Manpower (Washington,

D.C.: Center of Military History, Department of the Army, 1959), 101-104.

https://history.army.mil/html/books/001/1-8/CMH_Pub_1-8.pdf.

21 For more information on federal research funding and higher education see: Gary W. Matkin,

Technology Transfer and the University (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Roger Geiger, “The

Ambiguous Link: Private Industry and University Research,” In William E. Becker and Darrell

R. Lewis, eds., The Economics of Higher Education (Boston: Kluwer, 1992), 265-297;).

22 Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge, 86-102.

23 For more information on the rise of the Sun Belt see: David L. Carlton, "The American South

and the U.S. Defense Economy: A Historical View," in Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The

South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 151-62; James C. Cobb, The Selling of the

South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990 (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1993); Martin V. Melosi, "Dallas-Fort Worth: Marketing the Metroplex," in

Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World

War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 162-95; George Brown Tindall, The

Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967).

39

problems facing the state. Craig and Yocum concluded that Ohio’s economy was dominated by

— and therefore hinged on the success of — agriculture and industry. Roughly two-thirds of

Ohio’s annual GDP and workforce relied on the production of iron, steel, clay, glass, wheat,

corn, and automobiles, meaning that the state could be instantly plunged into a deep recession if

any combination of those industries took a cyclical downturn.24

Nearly a decade prior, state leaders had simply ignored similar conclusions reached by

the Science Committee, but by the mid-1950s, the need to build economic diversity in Ohio was

becoming too evident to ignore. Over the next seven years, the IDC studied what Ohio could do

to keep industries from leaving and attract new industries to the state. Their conclusions, which

reached Ohio’s General Assembly in 1962, showed a complete reversal on the state’s tradition of

eschewing the public financing in private industry. Initially, the IDC told legislators that

“public financing programs for private industry” was the only way to bolster manufacturing in

Ohio.25 Moreover, the IDC believed Ohio probably lost industries because the state refused to

sponsor development programs in public higher education that created a newly skilled workforce

and technological advances.26

In order to reach their conclusions, the IDC had surveyed numerous industry leaders in

the state about what steps policymakers should take to spur future economic growth. An

overwhelming majority recommended a pathway that Ohio’s leaders had long disregarded:

investment in public higher education.27 But the IDC’s report wasn’t the only indictment of

Ohio’s leaders. Within months of the IDC Report, the Department of Defense published the

Military Prime Contract Awards by State, 1950-1962. There, on the report’s thirteenth page,

was the final proof that Ohio’s legislators needed to understand how their lack of investment in

public higher education had legislative lasting consequences. Every year since 1950 Ohio had

lost a net percentage of military contracts, and by 1962, 54.6 percent of the state’s contracts with

24 Warren Van Tine, et al, In the Workers’ Interest: A History of the Ohio AFL-CIO, 1958-1998

(Columbus, OH: Center for Labor Research, 1998), 4-27.

25 “Industrial Development Committee Report on Plant Movement Out of Ohio during the Period

From 1955-1962," 12/10/62, p. 6, Collison Papers, box 3, folder, 3, Ohio Historic Archives

Library.

26 Ibid., 2.

27 Research Facilities Committee, Research Facilities in Ohio: A Report of the Research

Facilities Study Committee (Columbus, OH: Ohio Legislative Service Commission, 1963), 9.

40

the federal government had disappeared.28

Meeting minutes from May 11, 1962, when the General Assembly Legislative Service

Commission met with the Research Facilities Study Commission, reveal that some state leaders

recognized their mistake. First, some Assemblymen admitted “Ohio’s economy would now be

considerably stronger if a concerted research and development effort had been launched several

years ago.”29 Second, members of the Research Facilities Commission contended that “unless

the Ohio industrial, governmental, and educational community undertakes to participate far more

in this technological and economic revolution than has been the case thus far, the general

economy of this state will suffer some very real deterioration.”30 Third, both groups agreed that

Ohio’s limited research and development capacity and failure to attract federal contracts

stemmed from the state’s “astonishingly low” commitment to research universities.31 Fourth, the

General Assembly agreed that they must encourage and invest in the creation of private and

public research facilities, introduce competitive salary packages for researchers at public

universities, and create more graduate student programs to support the growth of graduate

student research.32

With their newfound goals in hand, Ohio’s General Assembly and Chamber of

Commerce spent the summer of 1962 canvasing the state to find members for the organization

that would lead the state’s charge to increase research and development capacities in higher

education. By the fall of 1962, The Ohio Research and Development Foundation (ORDF), a

state-supported advocacy group, was created. Taking their lead from the General Assembly’s

meeting with the Research Facilities Study Commission, the ORDF set about accomplishing

three primary goals. First, the group would evaluate the present status of Ohio’s research and

development capabilities, primarily in public universities. Second, the members would ascertain

how the federal government could use Ohio’s research and development facilities. Third, and

28 United States Department of Defense, “Military Prime Contract Awards by State, 1950-1962,”

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1962).

29 Ohio General Assembly, Meeting Minutes, May 11, 1962, General Assembly/Legislative

Services Commission, "Minutes and Reports, 1947-1985," frame 113, Series 1609, Ohio Historic

Archives Library.

p.5

30 Ibid., 12.

31 Ibid., 25. 32 Ibid., 28.

41

most significant, ORDF would “create and foster plans to significantly improve the collaboration

between higher education and industry” to “increase the state’s research and development

capacities.”33 For the first time since World War II, public higher education had a purpose in

Ohio — research and collaboration with industry.

In order to ensure Ohio began moving forward on each initiative, ORDF needed the

General Assembly and Governor to support their mission and quickly approve funding. It

seemed obvious that ORDF’s plan had the support of the General Assembly. After all, both

chambers of the Assembly agreed to ORDF’s creation despite hesitation from fiscally

conservative Republicans who still cringed at any growth in the state’s power. But the

incumbent Democratic Governor, Michael DiSalle, who supported dramatic increases in state

expenditures to pay for the investment public higher education through hiking tax revenues on

cigarettes, alcohol and corporations had just been defeated by the relatively unknown and

unpolished Republican Mayor of Columbus, Jim Rhodes.

Jim Rhodes — an Interlude

When it comes to the history of Ohio’s system of public higher education, no other figure plays a

more vital and fascinating role than Jim Rhodes. A native of Indiana, Rhodes’ family moved to

Ohio after the death of his father when Rhodes was a young boy. Records indicate Rhodes’

father died during the influenza outbreak of 1918, but Rhodes, fearing the story of his father’s

death would make him look less masculine, instead told voters his father died in a tragic mining

accident in West Virginia — a mistruth that in part earned Rhodes the credentials he needed to

win over Ohio’s working-class voters.34 As Mayor of Columbus, Rhodes further cemented his

status as a friend-of-labor when he supported Democratic union members’ right to collectively

bargain after World War II. Whether or not he purposefully willed himself to become the state’s

33 “The Ohio Research and Development Foundation, Inc.: Its History and Objectives,” n.d., pp.

1-2, MSS 700, Ohio Research and Development Foundation Papers, box 1, folder 23, Ohio

Historic Archives Library.

34 “James Rhodes and the 1960s Origins of Contemporary Ohio,” in Van Tine, Warren and

Michael Pierce, eds., Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History (Columbus: The Ohio State

University Press, 2003).

42

working-class hero, or the mantel simply fell in his lap, Rhodes ran for Governor in 1962 as the

champion of the common man.35

What attracted working-class voters to Rhodes may have been his plain-spoken,

sweeping ideas about how to retain Ohio’s initial postwar economic success. Rather than

providing detailed explanations about how he would bring jobs back to the state, Rhodes simply

promised he would create jobs.36 Instead of coming up with original thoughts to show voters his

dedication to critical thinking, Rhodes co-opted ideas he thought would win the support of

voters. Of Rhodes’ lack of original thinking and ability to make his ideas seem original, one

historian writes:

“He [Rhodes] was not someone who reflected on problems, considered their nuances, and

sought to resolve their consistencies and contradictions into a new solution. He was instead

adept at scanning his environment, listening and looking for ideas to co-opt. His skill was then

in applying those ideas to a political situation and shepherding it through the process of making

public policy. To the convenience of Rhodes, the emerging idea of late 1962 was restructuring

Ohio’s economy by fostering technological research and development.”37

And that is the path Rhodes chose to follow, albeit late in his campaign. On October 2, 1962 —

just over a month before the election — Rhodes published his plan to bring jobs, research, and

technological development to Ohio. The Blueprint for Brainpower: A Program for Higher

Education in Ohio represented both Rhodes’ commitment to the working-class and the growing

belief held by most of the state’s leaders that Ohio needed to focus on developing the state’s

research capabilities through an invest in public higher education. But, instead of demanding an

increase in state-funded graduate student research, Rhodes believed that legislators should fully

reshape Ohio’s system of public higher education to provide more access to all students so the

percentage of possible future researchers could also increase. “We have only just crossed the

threshold of the golden age of science,” Rhodes commented in 1962, and “we need brainpower

to continue these magnificent advances.”38 Rhodes estimated that higher education enrollments

would climb from 140,000 to 210,000 full-time students by 1970 across all institutions — not

35 Tom Diemer, Lee Leonard, and Richard G. Zimmerman, James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus

(Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2014),78-94.

36 Ibid.

37 William Russell Coil, “New Deal Republican:” James A. Rhodes and the Transformation of

the Republican Party, 1933-1983,” PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2005, 258. 38 James A. Rhodes, “Blueprint for Brainpower,” State Library of Ohio Digital Collections,

1962. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401ccp2/id/4510.

43

just public colleges and universities — and the General Assembly “must commence as soon as

possible a capital expansion program at state universities to prepare them for the tremendous

increase in number of students who will want to attend them,” wrote Rhodes.39 But that wasn’t

all.

Rhodes outlined five recommendations the state should follow to create a new higher

education program and these recommendations became an outline for the purpose of public

higher education un subsequent sections. The initial section of recommendations emphasized

increased state support. First, Rhodes believed public colleges and universities should receive

increased state funding as their enrollments grew. Second, to encourage more students to enroll,

especially students from working-class backgrounds, Rhodes suggested that legislators use more

of the state budget to subsidize the first two years of college courses for students to attend state

supported institutions — including the establishment of technical colleges, branch campuses and

community colleges.40 Pushing further, Rhodes believed that any municipality or county that

wanted a college should receive one with assistance from the state. Rhodes believed the General

Assembly should finally pass the stalled Senate Bill 519, which “provided for the creation of

branch campuses sponsored by either state supported or other universities in counties and

municipalities” to enable “young people to obtain two years of college credit toward a full

degree while avoiding board and room costs.”41

Perhaps Rhodes’ most important recommendation was his last. Ohio’s six public

institutions were officially guided by the loosely bound Inter-University Council (IUC), which

functioned as an organization of public university presidents to protect their interests with the

Ohio General Assembly.42 Although the IUC wielded an unusual amount of power and held

more autonomy than most higher education governing bodies in the nation, it was financially

strapped by the state’s longstanding blasé attitude towards education. Founded in 1939, the IUC

had failed in the first twenty years of its existence to get the state of Ohio to appropriate more

funds to public higher education. IUC member and former Miami University President John

39 James A. Rhodes, “Blueprint for Brainpower,” 1.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 3.

42 Michael A. Olivas, “State Law and Postsecondary Coordination: The Birth of the Ohio Board

of Regents,” The Review of Higher Education 7, no. 4 (1984): 357-395.

44

Millett remarked in 1953 that “Ohio as a state was simply not disposed to support its public

higher education in generous terms.”43

Rhodes believed the IUC should be brought under control of the state, and in return the

IUC would be given more authority, and money, to shape public higher education. Above all

else, Rhodes wanted a governing body that would develop a master plan for the expansion of

public higher education, identify areas for capital improvement, plan for the expansion of Ohio’s

public university system, and develop graduate programs to help diversify Ohio’s economy.

Rhodes was suggesting that Ohio’s system of public higher education should be governed by a

state-sponsored body like the university systems in states where higher education was a top

priority.

Rhodes went on to soundly defeat the Democratic incumbent DiSalle in November and

began work on turning the IUC into the Ohio Board of Regents. In less than sixteen months, the

General Assembly passed a resolution to create a $175 million bond issue that was approved by

Ohio voters and agreed to accept federal funds from the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963

that authorized “assistance to public and other nonprofit institutions of higher education in

financing the construction, rehabilitation, or improvement of needed academic and related

facilities in undergraduate and graduate institutions."44 With nearly $187 million now available

to invest in the state’s public universities, the General Assembly passed HB 214 creating the

Ohio Board of Regents as the state’s higher education planning and coordinating board, which

would be headed by Millett.45

Rhodes and the Regents: 1964-1968

A report from Science magazine in 1964 claimed “In higher education, Ohio is going through a

reappraisal and reorganization, and support is growing behind the doctrine that the economic

future can be brightened by freer use of public funds to educate scientists, engineers, and other

43 Michael A. Olivas, “State Law and Postsecondary Coordination,” 360.

44 United States Congress, "Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963", Public Law 88-204, 77

STAT 363, 1963, p. 1, accessed June 2018. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/299886.

45 John D. Millet, Politics and Higher Education (University of Alabama Press, 1975).

45

professionals, to support research.”46 The same report, however, called out Ohio’s earlier

hesitation to invest in public higher education, “It can fairly be said that, compared to California,

Ohio and the other Midwestern states have been laggardly in organizing to provide the

coordinated system of low-cost, accessible, and diversified public higher education for which a

heavy demand has developed since World War II.”47

Armed with information and a now-supportive General Assembly, the Board of Regents

created a state master plan that detailed how legislators should expand public higher education

and what purpose the new system should serve. In June 1966, the Board of Regents published

The Master Plan for State Policy in Higher Education, a 125-page document that suggested that

public higher education should serve two purposes: geographic access to a college or university

so any student that wanted to attend could do so and investment in the development of elite

graduate programs that produced industry-leading research.

The Regents devised a three-tier priority system based on population, need and

demographics. Areas of the state with lower-incomes, a high percentage of industrial jobs, or

more than thirty miles away from higher education would receive a two-year community college,

branch campus, or vocational/technical institution. What made two-year institutions so

important? For the Regents, two-year institutions made all the difference. In 1966, provisions of

the Ohio law that created the Board of Regents — Revised Code 3333.04 — made it illegal for

any state assisted institutions to deny access to any student with a high school diploma. The

Regents believed the policy of open access — the same policy championed by Rhodes — should

be continued under their new system of public higher education, but with a catch. Instead of

funneling first-year students to public four-year colleges and universities, the Regents believed

lower-division students — those classified as “Freshman” or “Sophomore” — should take their

general education courses at a two-year institution and transfer to a public four-year institution

once they had enough credits to take a major.48 Towards that end, the Regents also specified that

all public four-year colleges and universities should focus their academic program on upper-

46 “Ohio: With New Board of Regents, Master Plan in Works, State Takes Plunge into State-

Wide Planning,” Science 145, no. 3629, 253.

47 “Ohio: With New Board of Regents, Master Plan in Works, State Takes Plunge into State-

Wide Planning,” 253.

48 Ohio Board of Regents, “State Master Plan for State Policy in Higher Education: 1966,”

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 12.

46

division students — those classified as “Junior” or “Senior”— and graduate research.49 The

Regents stated that two-year institutions would “meet the growing enrollment demand in Ohio”

and “limit large enrollments on campuses,” which would help four-year campus facilities

concentrate “upon upper division, graduate, and graduate professional study.”50 Two-year

institutions, in other words, would be a perfect way to avoid overcrowding on four-year

campuses.

The Regents seemed to be well aware of the fact that most of the students attending two-

year campuses would be part-time students already employed and seeking credentials or an

associate’s degree instead of a four-year degree — a fact that carried numerous financial benefits

for the state. The Regents believed branch campuses would “provide opportunity for higher

education” for those persons who cannot be enrolled at a main campus “because of housing,

expense, or part-time employment.”51 The Regents also believed that one of the largest solicitors

of two-year colleges would be “professionally employed persons, especially in the public schools

and in business, who desire to improve their competency with additional higher education.”52

There was also a national development that made the construction of two-year campuses within a

state-assisted four-year institution a smart decision for Regents. The Higher Education Facilities

Act of 1963 provided, federal “assistance to public and other nonprofit institutions of higher

education in financing the construction, rehabilitation, or improvement of needed academic and

related facilities in undergraduate and graduate institutions."53 The federal government would

match funds put forward by a university that wanted to build or renovate their facilities, which

would naturally decrease the amount of funding the Regents had to commit to the construction of

a new branch campus and save more funding for research facilities — their top priority.

While two-year institutions met the criteria for providing access to public higher

education, the Regents also needed a plan to help ensure Ohio’s public universities became

academically elite. The Regents wanted to “upgrade and substantially increase Ohio’s

contributions to graduate education” while simultaneously expanding “state university activity in

research and increase the contributions of university research activities to Ohio’s businesses and

49 Ibid., 12, 13.

50 Ohio Board of Regents, “State Master Plan for State Policy in Higher Education: 1966,” 131. 51 Ibid., 131.

52 Ibid.

53 United States Congress, "Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963,” 1.

47

industry.”54 The Regents’ desire to expand graduate programs was not misplaced. One national

outlet, writing about the development of a new public higher education in Ohio, remarked, “One

of the biggest problems facing the regents is to find ways and means to upgrade and expand

advanced education in the sciences, engineering, and medicine in the cause of economic

growth.”55

Rhodes played an influential role in the Regents’ decision. In a February 1966 meeting,

while the Regents were still constructing their initial Master Plan, Rhodes had a letter read aloud

to the Regents that explicitly stated they weren’t doing enough to address the problem of

graduate education. “In connection with the attention which the Board of Regents is giving to

the whole problem of university research and its relation to the technical development and

economic growth of business in Ohio,” writes Rhodes, “I believe it would be highly desirable to

broaden the scope of your concern to include the whole subject of graduate education, especially

at the doctoral level, and its relationship to technical development and economic growth.”56

Rhodes’ change of heart can be attributed to two things. First, his desire to have higher

education within thirty miles of every Ohioan included graduate education as well, not just two-

year campuses. Second, and more likely, Rhodes was also preparing to introduce a bill to the

General Assembly that would take six percent of general revenue taxes each year and put them

towards capital improvement projects. The more technical development and economic growth

Ohio experienced, the more revenue Rhodes would have to put towards capital improvement

projects.

The initial push for expanded graduate education proved to be quite successful. By 1967

the General Assembly had approved nineteen new Ph.D. programs across six public institutions

since 1963 including Linguistics and Nuclear Engineering at Ohio State, Chemistry at Akron,

and Physics and Solid-State Physics at Kent State.57 The Regents also used their allocation from

the General Assembly to approve a $1.4 million Biological Sciences Laboratory at Miami

54 Ohio Board of Regents, “New Responses to Vital Issues in Public Higher Education,” 1967,

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 4.

55 “Ohio: With New Board of Regents, Master Plan in Works, State Takes Plunge into State-

Wide Planning,” Science 145, no. 3629, 254.

56 Ohio Board of Regents, Minutes of Meeting of February 18, 1966, Official Minutes of the

Board of Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 14.

57 Ibid., 14.

48

University and a $3.5 million engineering and science laboratory at Youngstown State.58 The

Regents also moved quickly to approve dozens of requests for law schools and Masters’

programs. In late 1964, the Regents approved both Akron and Kent State to grant Juris

Doctorates.59 Bowling Green State University was approved to grant an M.A. in Geography, an

M.S. General Experimental Psychology, Speech Pathology, and Physics while Ohio received

permission to grant Masters’ in Fine Arts, Music, Archeology, and Engineering.60

The Board of Regent’s plan was based on the argument that information and technology

developed at research facilities would be a lucrative means of making money from industries

hungry for the latest scientific developments, which would in-turn ignite even more economic

growth across the state and decrease Ohio’s outsized reliance on industrial manufacturing. The

only problem is that the Regents needed an initial investment of $420 million from the General

Assembly.61 Such an investment was problematic because the state of Ohio did not have an

income tax and Governor Rhodes was known for his refusal to even discuss imposing an income

tax. If any additional funding was needed for any long-lasting capital improvement project

around the state, Rhodes exclusively used state bond issues.62 And it seemed like additional

funding was desperately needed to both increase enrollment in the state’s geographically isolated

areas and in the newly minted graduate programs. But by 1968 Rhodes’ tone on the purpose of

public higher education had drastically departed from supporting graduate education to cursing

the Regents’ emphasis on expanding it.

58 Ohio Board of Regents, Minutes of Meeting of June 12, 1964, Official Minutes of the Board of

Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, p. 2; Ohio Board of Regents, Minutes of Meeting of February 18,

1966, Official Minutes of the Board of Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, 8.

59 Ohio Board of Regents, Minutes of Meeting of September 11, 1964, Official Minutes of the

Board of Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, 3; Ohio Board of Regents, Minutes of Meeting of

October 9, 1964, Official Minutes of the Board of Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, Southwest

Ohio Regional Depository, 1.

60 See: 1964, Official Minutes of the Board of Regents Volume 1, 1963-1966, 03/09/1965,

04/22/1965, 07/06/1965, 02/08/1966. 61 Ohio Board of Regents, “Capital Improvement Plan for State Assisted Institutions of Higher

Education, 1967-1973” (Columbus: Columbus Blank Book Company, 1967), Southwest Ohio

Regional Depository, 3.

62 Diemer, Leonard, and Zimmerman, James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus, 44.

49

Rhodes v. The Regents, 1968-1970

The Regent’s had proved reluctant to invest in, or expand, vocational/technical education

because they believed high schools could offer such training, and the state really didn’t have the

funding to build even more campuses. During the Regents’ second official meeting in 1963,

they discussed the topic of state-supported technical institutes. The meeting minutes reveal that

several key Regent members — including Ohio Director of Commerce, Warren H. Chase, who

served as the Regent’s Acting-Secretary — believed the Regents were only responsible for

cultivating community colleges, municipal universities and state university branch campuses

while “vocational training should be the responsibility of the high school.”63 It’s important to

note that vocational education was originally a designated responsibility of American high

schools, who had received federal funding since 1917 due to The Smith-Hughes National

Vocational Education Act. Moreover, the Smith-Hughes Act mandated that each state create a

board that specifically focused on vocational education. It wasn’t until 1963 that federal funding

significantly increased and state systems of higher education began offering vocational education

courses at two-year campuses. Even then, vocational education was still largely controlled by

Ohio’s Department of Education.

The Regents also made their lack of support for funding technical education known to

Rhodes. In a letter to Rhodes dated November 29th, 1963, the Regents did not mention technical

education as priority, but instead argued that Ohio had an immediate need to build campus

housing, science and research facilities, expansion of local higher education, and more students

in advanced degree programs.64 When the President of Cuyahoga Community College, Charles

E. Chapman, approached the Regents in December, 1963 for funding to start a technical

education on campus, the Regents tabled his request and told him to return the following month

so they could “study in greater detail, the advisability of adding technical programs.”65 At the

63 Official Minutes of the Board of Regents, Volume I: September 1963 to December 1966,

November 8th, 1963, 5.

64 Harold W. Oyster to James A. Rhodes, November 29th, 1963, Official Minutes of the Board of

Regents, Volume I: September 1963 to December 1966.

65 Official Minutes of the Board of Regents, Volume I: September 1963 to December 1966,

December 13th, 1963, 6.

50

following month’s meeting, President Chapman’s request was granted, but not before the

Regents approved a request from The Ohio State University to establish a doctorate degree in

optometry and a Ph.D. program in Slavic Languages.66

The Regents’ hesitation surrounding vocational/technical education soon became a

talking point for Rhodes, who, by 1968, believed public higher education should focus on

expanded access at the lower-level so students could get the necessary skills and training for

immediate employment while using research and development to assist industrial manufacturing.

The Regents were planning for the future of Ohio; Rhodes believed Ohio had no future if its

citizens couldn’t receive the education they needed for a good-paying job. On one occasion

Rhodes even remarked that public higher education had “bowed to the snobbery of the limited

group able to achieve in a few of the favored disciplines.”67 What makes this quote even more

stupendous is that it is not even close to the fever pitch of anger Rhodes reached on the subject.

To ensure Rhodes’ words aren’t minced, it seems appropriate to quote his grievances without

interruption:

“Recently, one of the major universities in Ohio “decreed,” as though from Caesar on

high, that all students entering the university would be required to wade through 2 years

of general studies before they could enter their college of specialty. This important

change, made under the guise of “academic excellence,” was not based on research, but

on the intellectual snobbery of the worst kind. This change was perpetuated by persons

who attempt to build their own professional standing on the shattered lives of students—

students who might have been successful if the educational program made any sense.

Instead of goal-centered education, which makes sense to students, they find they must

wade through 2 years of super high school academic theory before they can possibly

enter their professional area.

Universities contribute much in the area of research dealing with physical sciences,

engineering, and many of the social sciences, such as psychology; however, they seem to

be utterly blind to all research dealing with the educational process. This blindness

becomes oppression in term of controls on the high schools—controls requiring that

every student in the schools complete the “necessary” subjects to enter the “best

colleges.” This is true, in spite of the fact that massive research proves this requirement

to be false.”68

66 Official Minutes of the Board of Regents, Volume I: September 1963 to December 1966,

January 10th, 1964, 2,7. 67 James A. Rhodes, Alternative to a Decadent Society (New York: Howard W. Sams & Co,

1969), Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 5.

68 Ibid., 23-24.

51

Rhodes’ comments raise the question of whether or not his anger is misplaced. Was public

higher education becoming too elitist? The answer depended on who you asked. Until the early-

1970s, the Regents were represented by John D. Millett. Like Rhodes, Millett was born in

Indiana, but that is where their similarities end. After receiving his Ph.D. in Political Science

from Columbia University and spending one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the London School

of Economics, Millett served as a Colonel in the United States’ Army during World War II and

earned the Legion of Merit before joining the graduate faculty at Columbia — all before his 35th

birthday. After his tenure as President of Miami University (OH) (1953-1964), Millett spent

eight years as the Regents’ Chancellor where his thoughts on the purpose of public higher

education influenced much of the Regents’ planning.

According to Millett, public higher education should be viewed as a social institution that

balances the needs of the individual students and the reality of an ever-changing United States’

economy. In no uncertain terms Millett believed professional education was the key to national

social and economic success. In 1970, Millett wrote, “In social terms, the purpose of higher

education is to meet the demand for educated persons required for professional practice, and now

required also for the practice as professional associates.”69 Towards that end, Millett also made

clear that higher education is responsible for “providing educated talent to the American

economy” and contributing “an expanded knowledge to American society.”70 Millett’s words

carry a level of significance to an on-going debate about the purpose of public higher education

in the United States because they acknowledged the individual’s role in becoming educated and

contributing to the economy. “The case for higher education necessarily rests upon a different

kind of assumption,” writes Millett, “and that assumption is the contribution of educated talent to

the physical material, and other well-being of the American people” that assists “in the solution

of pressing social and governmental problems.”71

The Rhodes who, less than five years earlier, told the Regents, “to broaden the scope of

your concern to include the whole subject of graduate education,” now believed the purpose of

public higher education should be training young workers for vocational and technical

69 Ohio Board of Regents, “Planning, Programming & Budgeting for Ohio’s Public Institutions

of Higher Education” (Columbus: Columbus Blank Book Company: 1970), Southwest Ohio

Regional Depository, 10.

70 Ibid., 12.

71 Ibid., 12, 28.

52

occupations. In his opinion, vocational and technical training had failed to grow because of

“educational snobbery” that viewed both “as second class or poor education.”72 Rhodes went on

to claim that secondary and higher education has “been notoriously poor in providing guidance

for students related to occupations in which most of the American people are required to work as

adults.”73

What explains Rhodes’ change of heart about the purpose of public higher education?

One reason could be his reluctance to admit that Ohio had, due mostly to the loss of industrial

jobs, fallen into a deep fiscal bind during his time in office and he wanted to prove to his

working-class base that he was still on their side, which meant scaling back on spending not

directly related to job creation. Rhodes reorganized the system and governance of higher

education in the state while simultaneously using his political charm and connections to pass

state-wide bond issues that bankrolled the capital improvement of higher education. At the same

time, however, Rhodes’ reluctance to create a state income tax left any capital improvement

project at the mercy of bond issues, which had the possibility of leaving the state in crippling

debt if not handled carefully. And that’s basically what happened to the Board of Regents when

they proposed their $425 capital improvement plan in 1968. One of Rhodes’ top priorities going

into his re-election year of 1968 was the passing of a $759 million highway and general capital

improvements bond — a measure that would invariably provide work to numerous industrial and

blue-collar workers — that needed legislative approval to be on the ballot and voter confirmation

for the funds to become available.74 It was financially inconceivable the state could afford both

higher education and roads.

What little amount Ohio did collect in taxes from businesses and industry had steadily

declined throughout the 1960s along with a sizeable portion of jobs. One independent evaluation

from the United States’ Department of Housing and Urban Development found that between

1960 and 1970 Ohio’s economic production and job growth didn’t keep up with national

averages, particularly in the areas of industrial manufacturing and industrial services.75 For

72 Rhodes, Alternative to a Decadent Society, 48.

73 Rhodes, Alternative to a Decadent Society, 54.

74 Diemer, Leonard, and Zimmerman, James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus, 51. 75 Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission, “The Economy of the Miami Valley Region: A

Mid-Decade Assessment Using Shift-Share and Economic Base Analysis,” (Dayton, OH, 1977),

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 4.

53

example, the region surrounding Ohio’s fifth largest county, Montgomery, and fourth-largest

metropolitan area, Dayton, lost over 10,000, or 7.9 percent, industrial manufacturing jobs

between 1960 and 1970 while losing another 10,000, or 21.5, non-electrical machine

manufacturing jobs and nearly 10 percent of all federally contracted jobs during the same time

period.76 If Rhodes was as attuned to the working-class as he claimed, it would be impossible

for him to not know what going on with the state’s economy.

Another significant contextual issue was the changing nature of the Republican Party’s

thinking about the purpose of higher education in the 1970s. Most Republicans, including

Rhodes, fell in line behind President Richard Nixon’s belief that higher education had slipped

into a malaise of irrelevant curriculums with too much emphasis on research, and the unequal,

ill-use of federal funds.77 One of Nixon’s most lofty goals was the creation of a career education

program in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that, according to his

Administration, “would authorize formula grants to be given to states to cover part of the cost of

beginning new programs of education in critical career skills in community colleges, technical

institutes, and other post-secondary institutions.”78

Thus, Rhodes’ thinking about higher education changed over the course of his

governorship (1962-71). In the early- to mid-1960s he was more in line with liberal Republicans

who favored maintaining certain New Deal-era programs and tentatively supporting some of

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda. By 1970, however, Rhodes’ rhetoric and actions

show a dramatic shift towards the politics of fear curated by President Nixon, California

Governor Ronald Reagan, and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who was known not only for

his blatant racism, but also his promise of "low-grade industrial development, low taxes, and

trade schools" to any person who wanted an education.79 These ‘Law-and-Order’ Republicans

are perhaps most infamous for using rising inflation, campus protests, rampant unemployment,

violence related the Civil Rights Movement, deindustrialization, urban decay, women’s

76 Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission, “The Economy of the Miami Valley Region,”

i-v, 4, 10.

77 Richard Nixon, "Richard Nixon's Plan for Higher Education » Richard Nixon Foundation,"

Richard Nixon Foundation, September 08, 2016, accessed June 2019.

https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2014/03/rns-plan-higher-education/.

78 Ibid.

79 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism,

and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 103.

54

liberation, and the softening stance towards Communism as fodder for an assault against pro-

government, multi-cultural liberalism that was popularly associated with higher education — a

political position that rallied those Americans who felt the supposed radicalism of the 1960s had

negatively changed their country.80 According to these Republicans, college and university

campus were the places most responsible for fostering America’s growing sect of radical youth.81

Even though recent studies have shown that a significant number of colleges and universities

were politically inactive during the 1960s, several isolation incidents of campus protest quickly

stigmatized higher education for millions of Americans as colleges and universities went from

being seen as places of economic security to hotbeds of fear.82

The 1969-1970 academic year proved to be a turning point in the narrative of Ohio’s

public system of higher education due, in large part, to Rhodes’ changing political positions and

fateful decisions. In December 1969 Rhodes called out the National Guard in response to Black

student activists occupying the administration building at Akron University, but not before

calling their actions a “disgrace,” which earned him approval from some voters. One Ohioan

said that Rhodes had “restored [his] faith in law in order,” while another praised Rhodes for his

“consistent firmness and common sense in dealing with these university fiascos.”83

On Saturday, May 2nd, 1970, Rhodes agreed to send Companies A and C of the 1/145th

Infantry and Troop G of the 2/107th Armored Cavalry of Ohio’s National Guard to Kent, Ohio to

maintain order against what he saw as a growing, lawless mob. By Saturday evening, arsonists

had set the city’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps building on fire before the Ohio National

Guard could arrive. According to Rhodes, who addressed the state shortly after the violence was

contained, the mob was “worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the

night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America…I

80 For more information on the Republican Party’s push towards conservatism in the 1960s see:

James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford,

1996); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s

(New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Jonathan Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority’,” in

Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

81 Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in

the Vietnam Era (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 235-240.

82 John R. Thelin, Going to College in Sixties (Williamsburg: William and Mary Press, 2018). 83 Mrs. Ed Hoban to JAR, 12/11/1969; Lonzo S. Green to JAR, 12/10/1969, MSS 353, James A.

Rhodes Papers, box 8, folder 6, Ohio Historical Society Archives.

55

think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever

assembled in America.”84 While the mob quieted down as the weekend came to an end, chaos

erupted on Monday, May 4th shortly after 12:00pm on the campus of Kent State University.

Fearing a loss of control, the National Guard fortified their position at the top of Blanket Hill —

a popular student gathering spot — and began thirteen seconds of shooting — firing sixty-one

shots — into the crowd. Four people were dead. Nine others were injured.

Rhodes’ actions and comments also showed he was officially done with supporting,

much less expanding, graduate degree programs in Ohio. Rhodes believed he had to literally

force technical education on campus administrators and threatened to use his control of the state

budget to ensure vocational education “over other degree programs, including any further

expansion of doctoral degree programs.”85 In less than ten years, from 1960 to 1970, Ohio’s

quest to renovate its system of public higher education had gone from a zealous, financially and

politically supported push to establish competitive graduate programs, research facilities, and

open access for those seeking a degree program to a hostile mission to develop vocational

education training over anything else.

Ohio in the Early-1970s: A Period of Transition

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the United States’ economy began its transition

from industrial manufacturing to the service and knowledge industries, but most historians agree

the timeframe starts in the early-1970s as disinvestment and globalization took hold of the

nation’s economy. Recent work by economists, however, suggest the trend started in the late-

1950s when the Midwest’s industrialists had little incentive to innovate or diversify their

business model. In fact, between 1950 and 1970, the Midwest’s industrial belt market share of

national manufacturing fell from 55 percent to 45 percent and eventually fell 28 percent from its

original share by 1980.86 What Rhodes witnessed during the 1969 election was an industrial

84 William W. Scranton, et al., Report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest

(Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), 253, 254.

85 Rhodes, Alternative to a Decadent Society, 28.

86 Simeon Alder, David Lagakos and Lee E. Ohanian, Competitive Pressure and the Decline of

the Rust Belt: A Macroeconomic Analysis, Working Paper 20538 (Cambridge, MA: National

Bureau of Economic Research, 2014). https://www.nber.org/papers/w20538.

56

manufacturing economy that he believed simply needed better trained workers to attract more

employers to the state.

In the early-1970s, Ohio’s leading industries — steel, rubber, glass, automobiles and

appliances — began to experience plant closures and job losses due to relocation mostly within

the United States.87 As a result, the population of major cities that once housed manufacturing

jobs began to decline. In some cases, the population decline was staggering. For example,

between 1970 and 1980 the populations of Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Dayton and Youngstown

all decrease by an average of 15 percent while Cleveland lost nearly 25 percent of its

population.88 The residents of these cities felt the effects of deindustrialization before the rest of

the state, which created a deep divide among the state’s legislators about how to handle the

situation. According to historians Kevin Kern and Greg Wilson, most political leaders in Ohio

believed the economic issue to be a local matter and felt passing any legislation that forced

manufacturers to give more advanced notice before plant closings would only make the plants

close faster, deter new businesses from moving to the state, or infringe upon the right of

businesses to open and close as they wished.89 Ohio’s General Assembly usually had a fairly

conservative nature, but beginning in 1970 the body was composed of an unusually high number

of conservative Democrats and anti-Democrat Republicans that held fast to a pro-business, anti-

big government doctrine90

State leaders seemed to genuinely believe that recovery from the steady decrease in

Ohio’s manufacturing output was possible. In 1973, the Ohio Department of Economic and

Community Development released its annual Review and Outlook: United States and Ohio

Economy, which provided economic forecasts for the private sector and predicted areas of

possible economic growth. Upon the report’s release, state unemployment was the highest it had

been since the Great Depression, the economy had contracted in multiple years for the first time

87 Kern and Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State, 459.

88 Ibid., 460.

89 Ibid., 462.

90 Hugh C. McDiarmid, “The Gilligan Interlude, 1971-1975,” in Alexander P. Lamis and Brian

Usher, eds., Ohio Politics (2nd edition), 114.

57

since World War II, more industrial plants had closed than opened, and inflation rates were still

growing.91

In 1971 Rhodes had reached a term limit and relinquished the Governorship to John

Gilligan, a World War II hero and moderate Democrat intent on instituting a state income tax.

Despite his insistence on an unpopular income tax law that would eventually get him ousted

from office after one term, Gilligan was perhaps the first governor to understand that industrial

manufacturing could not be Ohio’s economic lifeline. “Our well-developed industry base has

magnified economic upswings over the past several decades,” Gilligan reported in 1973, “But if

we are to translate the 1973 national economic upswing into tangible and lasting improvement

for every Ohio family, state government must take a strong leadership role to meet the challenge

of overcoming look overlooked problems in Ohio’s economy.”92

Ohio’s problems, according to Gilligan, stemmed from the state’s long-standing refusal

to diversify the economy, particularly in the area of scientific research and technological

development. Gilligan wanted “a public foundation to stimulate research and development

activities and growth of technology-intensive industry” and a “redirection of Ohio business

recruitment efforts toward the fast-growing services sector.”93 Gilligan told readers that in order

“to generate Ohio’s full potential for economic growth and development in 1973, we will

accelerate our “mind our business” approach at the state level,” which meant using the state’s

stock of “personnel, expertise and resources” to improve the economic climate to attract new

business that represent “80 percent of the state’s future economic growth.”94 In different words,

Gilligan was acutely aware of the fact that Ohio’s economy could not grow with diversification

and significant investment in research and development. In 1973, Gilligan organized the

Citizens Task Force on Higher Education and the appointed committee reported in 1974 that

Ohio was not positioned to succeed without sustained, purposeful public investment in higher

education. Ohio ranked 15th in the nation for per-capita-income, but also ranked 48th in per-

capita expenditure on higher education with the lowest overall enrollment of any state caused, in

91 John J. Gilligan, “Review and Outlook: United States and Ohio Economy,” Ohio Department

of Economic and Community Development (Columbus, OH:1973), Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, i, iii.

92 John J. Gilligan, “Review and Outlook: United States and Ohio Economy,” i. 93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

58

large part, by high undergraduate tuition costs at state-flagship institutions caused by a severe

lack in state assistance.95

With all of this in mind, the Regents also believed public higher education, among other

things, had a tuition problem. According to the data published in their 1976 Master Plan, the

Regents reported that the average American college student in 1975 paid roughly 25 percent of

their tuition while students in Ohio were expected to pay 35 percent of their tuition due to a lack

of state support, which wasn’t helped by the fact Ohio had the fourth highest public tuition fees

in the nation.96 Moreover, the Regents found that Ohio’s reliance on durable goods

manufacturing and the strong presence of union jobs dissuaded a good number of its citizens

from attending college.97 The Regents also called out the General Assembly for dragging their

feet on opening two-year regional campuses and believed the process took so long that “for

many years this important option was not available to high school graduates.”98 Ohio’s leaders

had created an economy reliant on jobs that were slowly fading away and the remaining

workforce was both uneducated and unable to afford tuition for them or their children.

A closer look at enrollment numbers and the state population patterns from the time

period reveal that the Regents had a point. Despite the massive enrollment increases caused by

children of the Baby Boom enrolling in higher education, Ohio was still lagging behind other

states in terms of how much of the population was actually going to college. First, a low

percentage of college-aged (18-to-22-year-old) students were enrolled in Ohio’s public colleges

and universities. The overall Ohio high school graduating class of 1968 numbered roughly

150,000 and 45,000, or 30 percent, went on to higher education.99 Far fewer students earned

degree. In 1966, a study by the Ohio Department of Education found that, on average, fourteen

out of every one-hundred Ohio high school students completed a bachelor’s degree.100 When

95 Samuel G. Sava, et al., “Citizens Task Force on Higher Education State of Ohio Final Report

to the General Assembly and the Board of Regents,” Columbus: 1974, Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, i-iv.

96 Ohio Board of Regents, “Higher Education in Ohio Master Plan: 1976,” Southwest Ohio

Regional Depository, 29.

97 Ibid., 27.

98 Ibid.

99 Rhodes, Alternative to a Decadent Society, 34.

100 Collins W. Burnett, “Studies Dealing with the Relationship Between a Prescribed Pattern of

High School Units for Entrance Requirements and Academic Success in College,” Enclosure

59

compared to the national average of twenty-six out of every one-hundred students completing a

bachelor’s degree, Ohio’s problem becomes even more pronounced.101 These figures are

significant because they represent the extent to which Ohio’s colleges and universities relied on a

small portion of graduating high school students to bolster enrollment. The spike in enrollment

caused by Baby Boomers was a financial boon for state-assisted institutions, but even with the

thousands of new students, Ohio still had fewer students going to college than states comparable

in population. Between 1945 and 1965 the state added four million new residents, which

certainly included a large number of college-aged students, or children who would eventually be

college-aged. Between 1965 and 1975, however, Ohio’s population only grew by 500,000 and

remained relatively unchanged for the next decade. It’s easy to see how a population growth of

four million people over twenty years is much more advantageous to college enrollment than a

growth of 500,000.

Ohio had the single largest enrollment increase, 8.4 percent, between 1966 and 1967 and

those 317,547 students represented 4.5 percent of the United States’ total enrollment in the fall of

1967, which hovered around 6.9 million.102 Ohio student enrollment in the fall of 1974 was

400,428 and represented 4.1 percent of the 9.7 million students attended college in the United

States.103 The change seems minimal, but when compared to national changes over the same

time frame, a troubling pattern emerges. National enrollment increased roughly 115 percent

from 1954 to 1964 and Ohio followed closely behind with an increase of 102 percent.104

Between 1964 and 1974, however, total enrollment in the United States increased by 82.5

percent — from 5,320,000 to 9,709,000 — while Ohio’s enrollment only increased by 61%.105

So why did Ohio’s enrollment plunge more quickly than the national average? Hidden beneath

the overall enrollment numbers is the fact that Ohio was falling behind the national average of

with September-October 1967 issue of Ohio Guidance News and Views, Ohio State Department

of Education, 78. https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED129998/page/n5/mode/2up.

101 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the

United States, Colonial Times to 1980.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1975/compendia/hist_stats_colonial-1970.html.

102 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Basic Data Series: Higher Education: 1975,” Southwest Ohio

Regional Depository, 11.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.

60

students who attended two-year institutions due largely to high price of tuition and the state not

doing enough to financially support low-income students.

Conclusion

Despite multiple state-sponsored studies in the 1940s that showed that Ohio’s policymakers and

legislators needed to better financially support public higher education, the state waited nearly

twenty years, an entire generation, to take the first step. With the creation of the Board of

Regents in 1963, and the release of their first Master Plan in 1966, public higher education in

Ohio began to be characterized as having a dual-purpose: to offer geographic and financial

accessibility as well as elite graduate programs. This dual purpose represented ongoing battles

amongst Ohio policy makers about the purpose of public higher education. After the General

Assembly and Governor Jim Rhodes invested in building new, affordable, geographically

accessible campuses, the Regents began to emphasize the development of elite, research-based

graduate programs. Governor Rhodes himself went back and forth about whether or not the state

should put resources into graduate education, but ultimately, he decided that the effort would be

valuable for Ohio’s economic development. By the late 1960s, the higher education system of

Ohio had settled on two-year campuses for associate’s degrees or credits towards a bachelor’s

degree and four-year campuses for upper-division students (juniors and seniors) earning

bachelor’s degrees and research based graduate degrees.

By 1970, however, Rhodes’ beliefs about, and support of, public higher education

changed, as evidenced by his use of the National Guard to end student protests on multiple

campuses. Instead of following the dual-purpose of higher education that had been laid out in

the Regents’ Master Plan, Rhodes decided to advocate for more state support of vocational and

technical education — a move that jeopardized both the Regents’ plan and future state economic

support for higher education. At the same time, the number of students enrolled in Ohio’s

colleges and universities was below the national average despite the enrollment growths caused

by Baby Boomers entering higher education across the nation. Either Ohio’s public colleges and

universities weren’t offering the type of courses Ohioans wanted, or needed, for employment or

the Regents’ plan to make public higher education more affordable and accessible wasn’t

working. Ohio had overcome nearly two decades of delay to double the amount of state-assisted

61

colleges in eight years — from 1962 to 1970 — but something was still holding a number of

students back from enrolling.

62

CHAPTER FOUR

A POLICY OF ACCESSIBILITY

Introduction

Since 1966, when the Ohio Board of Regents — the governing body of Ohio higher education —

published their first Master Plan for Ohio Higher Education, political and economic factors

played an influential role in determining the purpose of the state’s system of public higher

education. For the first ten years after their establishment in 1963, the Regents worked to build a

system of public higher education that emphasized both academic excellence at the graduate

level and universal access for lower-division students. The clear priority for the Regents,

however, was the need to demonstrate that Ohio could compete at the highest academic levels

with other states in the areas of research and technological development in order to earn lucrative

government contracts that would, in theory, diversify Ohio’s economy and provide thousands of

jobs for all facets of a workforce.

But, in addition to the state’s Governor, Jim Rhodes, decreasing support in advanced

higher education, a significant string of economic setbacks in the late-1970s undercut the dual-

purpose of Ohio public higher education of elite graduate-level research programs and accessible

higher education programs for working Ohioans. These economic setbacks were accompanied

by an emerging service sector economy that brought jobs that required skills or credentials that

higher education could provide. Unless the state wanted increased numbers of unemployment,

higher education had to be both financially accessible and relevant to the needs of Ohio’s

workforce.

During the process of repurposing public higher education in the late-1960s, the Regents

discovered that Ohio’s public colleges and universities had historically, when compared to other

states in the Midwest, enrolled a significantly smaller percentage of the state’s population in

higher education, regardless of how many campuses opened across the state. Moreover, Ohio

had a smaller percentage of college-aged students enrolled at two- or four-year colleges than any

other state in the Midwest despite the influx of Baby Boomers driving up enrollment at four-year

63

public campuses. Even though Ohio had more students enrolling in higher education than ever

before, roughly 70 percent the state’s traditional college-aged population was forgoing college

all together. The Regents found that a significant portion of the traditional college-aged

population who forewent college were women who were either low-income, Black, divorced

single mothers, or, in some cases, all of the above.

Examining how the purpose of Ohio higher education changed, and who was affected by

the changes, in the late-1970s and early-1980s is important because the story illustrates how

politics, policy and the economy play an outsized role in what version of public higher education

a state’s residents receive. Moreover, the changing purpose of public higher education during

this period of Ohio’s history provides a powerful example of the way that centralized state

control over higher education is not always a guaranteed way to fix systemic socio-economic

problems. American higher education has, in some ways, represented a route towards economic

and social mobility, but those routes are only available if state policymakers stay committed to

providing access through long-term planning. In other words, a policy of accessibility needs to

be tailored to a wide variety of groups of people: what is accessible to one group may not be

accessible to another.

Even when enrollments were reaching all-time highs across Ohio and the nation, a

significant number of students still couldn’t access higher education due to financial restrictions.

From the mid-to-late 1970s through the early-1980s, the Regents turned their focus to increasing

the percentage of Ohio’s population enrolled in college. While such actions may seem counter-

intuitive to the belief that college and university enrollments were experiencing unprecedented

enrollments, the fact of the matter is that aside from increased enrollments at large, public four-

year schools and some of their two-year satellite campuses, the overall enrollment in Ohio’s

public colleges and universities was comparatively low. This chapter seeks to complicate what

historians of higher education believe about the enrollment spikes caused by the Baby Boom and

argue that, particularly in Ohio, many traditional college-aged students simply didn’t go to

college.

64

Ohio’s Labor Market and Higher Education in Context

Ohio’s economic situation in the late-1970s and early-1980s was noted by the sudden collapse of

heavy industry that financially jeopardized the entire state. Some segments of heavy industry,

such as paper production and automobile assembly, went through a decades-long process of

decline while other industries like steel and rubber nearly disappeared, literally, without warning.

For example, in September 1977 Youngstown Sheet and Tube fired over 4,000 workers as the

factory was abruptly shuttered.1 In Akron, Goodyear and Firestone ended nearly all of their tire

production by 1980 in order to move operation to new plants with a more skilled workforce.2

The United States lost roughly half of its share of world manufacturing between 1960 and 1980,

but some companies still chose to adopt new production strategies to compete against

international competition. Rather than staying in cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo and

Youngstown, corporations simply built new factories in rural areas in and outside of the Midwest

where they could pay lower wages and escape union control.

Traditionally, laborers with a specialized education overwhelmingly flock to cities with

jobs that match their skill set. Even if a local city has a job that fits a laborer’s skills,

microeconomic theory dictates that “thick markets,” or those markets with an abundance of

available jobs that desire your skill set, provide more competitive pay, which causes a brain drain

from regions that don’t have thick markets. Furthermore, the companies that hire skilled laborers

need firms that provide intermediate outputs, or services like advertising, legal counsel or

engineering support larger firms can provide themselves. Put in a different way, cities with the

largest firms attract the most knowledgeable and skilled workers who then rely on smaller firms

who also attract the most knowledgeable and skilled workers — all of whom get paid the most

competitive salaries.3 Because industrial manufacturing moved out of Ohio, other inter-

connected businesses left the state too, or had to close their doors.

As for higher education, the Regents were worried that enrollment increases during the

mid-1970s, while significant, were still lagging behind other states. The Regents noted that the

number of Ohioans born between 1946 and 1961 created the largest demographic bulge that the

1 Kern & Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State, 465.

2 Ibid., 464. 3 William Papier, “Employment Problems in Ohio,” Journal of the Ohio University College

Business Administration, vol. 1, (1979): 2-4.

65

state had ever experienced, but that number was misleading when it came to the low proportion

of students who would actually enroll in college — a fact that had been causing enrollment

instability across Ohio system of public higher education for over a decade. Although about

75% of all Ohio 18 year olds graduated from high school, and of those, about 60% attended

colleges, even recent increases due to the Baby Boom still meant that the enrollment of college

age students had been declining, which led the Regents to state that “the participation rate of the

so-called traditional college age group has been declining during the decade of the 1970s.”4

At the public institutions of higher education, there was some, but not significant

enrollment growth during the decade of the 1970s.5 Of the state’s five residential universities,

only Miami University and Bowling Green State University had a larger enrollment in the fall of

1977 than in 1971, and the Regents noted that, “while Central State had experienced a 28 percent

decline, Kent State had experienced an 11 percent decline, and Ohio University experienced a 32

percent decline.”6 Enrollments were so unstable at Ohio University that the gains of over 2,000

full-time students between 1974 and 1976 were wiped away by 1978, leaving the school with 64

fewer students than they had in 1971.7 As a result, Ohio University had seen a 32 percent drop

in the amount of money collected from student tuition.8 The only institutions actually gaining

students between 1971 and the fall of 1977 were two-year community colleges and technical

schools. According to the Regents, “Cuyahoga Community College was about 40 percent larger;

Lakeland 66 percent larger; and Sinclair was 162 percent larger.”9 Of the state’s 17 technical

colleges, each had more substantial enrollment increases. In fact, between 1971 and 1977, the

Agricultural Technical Institute of Ohio State had the largest enrollment increase of any state-

assisted institution in the state with over 900 students.10 Interestingly enough, the only numbers

to truly increase, or, at the very least, remain stable, were enrollments in graduate education, due

in large part to the state subsidies given to graduate programs and their students.

4 Ohio Board of Regents, “A Strategic Approach to the Maintenance of Institutional Financial

Stability and Flexibility in the Face of Enrollment Instability or Decline,” Southwest Ohio

Regional Depository, 1979, 3.

5 Ibid., 47.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 122.

9 Ibid., 48.

10 Ibid.

66

In response to declining undergraduate enrollments, the Regents sought a new plan that

included finding new students, expanding academic programs, and reducing qualitative standards

of admission. Most important to the Regents’ plan was “the expansion of part-time enrollment”

and “the expansion of continuing education as a public service,” which would help “reduce long-

term economic commitments and “seek alternative uses of capital plant.”11 Critical to the plan

was that the targeted new students would come from “the recruitment and enrollment of… high

school graduates who may not have considered college enrollment as an alternative to

employment, to employment training, to military service, or to unemployment.”12

If the Regents could get more students enrolled, then they believed Ohio’s economy

could get back on track. “The only hope for higher education affluence lies in economic

growth,” wrote the Regents, “and in a demonstration that economic growth has been influenced

or advanced by higher education.”13 Unless more students, those students who had largely

forgone college, were not enrolled and trained for employment, “Ohio will experience declining

per capita income, declining capital investment, declining population, declining governmental

revenues, and a declining quality of life.”14 The following sections examine how Ohio’s General

Assembly and Board of Regents worked together to identify what segments of the state’s

population were not attending an institution of higher education, what the government could do

to assist those potential students into higher education, and how public higher education was

designed to help bring Ohio’s economy out of recession through a newly educated, service-sector

oriented workforce. The General Assembly and Board of Regents initially focused on enrolling

low-income women who were often single mothers in technical education programs before

turning their attention to creating a statewide career education program that would, if successful,

re-skill millions of Ohio’s workers.

11 Ohio Board of Regents, “A Strategic Approach to the Maintenance of Institutional Financial

Stability and Flexibility in the Face of Enrollment Instability or Decline,” 145, 147.

12 Ibid., 152.

13 Ibid., 29.

14 Ibid., 45.

67

Who’s Missing?

The Regents comprehended how significant the development of new skills would be to Ohio’s

economy and labor force, but they still had to figure out what groups of both traditional and non-

traditional college-aged students were most likely to forgo college. As early as 1974, the

Regents knew that “Ohio dramatically falls below the national average of all states in the

percentage of population enrolled in post-secondary education” and, when compared to peer

states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois, Ohio’s post-secondary enrollment would need to

grow by 80,000 “to have a percentage rate equaled the national average.”15 By 1979, the

Regents believed people were not using local campuses to improve their “mid-career

occupational or professional skill” through continuing education programs, or simply never

going to college in the first place and were deemed as “missing students.”16 The Regents

discovered that the largest group of Ohioans not attending college were low-income women — a

group often considered the most economically disadvantaged in Ohio.

According to the Regents, the majority of the women not attending college students were

low-income African Americans. Of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties, the five counties with the

highest percentage of Black residents were the top five counties with the highest number of

people not enrolled in higher education. The Black population of Cuyahoga, Hamilton, Franklin,

Summit, Montgomery and Lucas Counties in the late-1970s through the 1980s accounted for

roughly 68 percent of Ohio’s overall Black population, and 28 percent of the “missing students”

not enrolled in higher education.17 To make matters even more troublesome, the major city in

each county had a higher Black population, a higher poverty rate, and a larger percentage of

people not in the workforce than those living in non-metropolitan, majority non-Hispanic white

areas of the state.18 Ohio had fallen behind in the percentage of people not enrolled in higher

education because of the absence of enrollment in highly concentrated areas of poor, Black

15 Ohio Board of Regents, “New Directions in Higher Education,” Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, 1976, 1.

16 Ibid., 1.

17 Ohio Development Services Agency, Ohio African Americans, Columbus, OH: Ohio

Development Services Agency, 2019, accessed December 27, 2019.

https://development.ohio.gov/files/research/P7003.pdf.

18 Alan Mallach and Lavea Brachman, Ohio’s Cities at a Turning Point: Finding the Way

Forward, (Washington, D.C.: Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institute, 2010), 8, 9,

13, 15.

68

citizens. Much of the fault here lies in the Regent’s limited support of their own concept of

“accessibility.” Although since the first Master Plan for Higher Education in Ohio in 1966, the

Regents had made a commitment to access to higher education for those with limited economic

resources, it was not until the early-1980s that the Regents provided actual financial assistance to

those potential students. In other words, the Regents identified a social and emotional deficit of

African Americans as the cause for their low enrollment in higher education, and not their

limited financial resources and high tuition costs. In fact, finances were the main reason for

African American under-enrollment, and the financial barriers were, in part, created by higher

education institutions because of the state’s funding model: in 1979, the price of four-year higher

education across Ohio was almost $300 more than the national average.19 What’s more, the

average cost of tuition — without room and board — at the public four-year institutions serving

Cuyahoga, Franklin, Lucas, Montgomery Summit and Hamilton counties was roughly $1,000,

which was roughly 25 percent of local annual income.20 As a result, an overwhelming majority

of Black students living in these counties enrolled at two-year community colleges where the

cost of tuition averaged around $600.

The most under-represented sub-group in Ohio higher education was priced out of the

institutions that offered the most advanced degrees. The chances of low-income Black Ohioans

earning a four-year degree from a public college or university was the lowest of any

demographic group in the state. A report from 1983 reveals that a positive correlation existed

between an institution’s price — or its number of advanced degree programs — and the number

of Black students enrolled at that institution. For example, between 1979 and 1983, on average,

90% of all students attending branch campuses — a term the Regents used for two-year

campuses connected to residential, four-year institutions — technical colleges and four-year

institutions were white. These institutions also charged a higher tuition, or had more advanced

degree programs, than community colleges.21 Even though 10 percent of Ohio’s population was

19 Ohio Board of Regents, “Basic Data Series: 1987,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 41.

20 Ohio Board of Regents, “Basic Data Series: 1983,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 35,

36; National Longitudinal Surveys, Family Poverty Status and Family Poverty Level

Variables:1979-2018, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019,

https://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy79/other-documentation/codebook-

supplement/nlsy79-appendix-2-total-net-family-3.

21 Ohio Board of Regents, “Basic Data Series: 1983,” 62-68.

69

Black in 1983, they were woefully underrepresented at most public institutions. Black people

made up 6.8 percent of the students at four-year public institutions, 2.6% of the students at

branch campuses and 6.5 percent of the students at technical colleges.22 Black enrollment at

community colleges, however, was 14 percent.23 In fact, 70 percent of all Black college students

enrolled in Ohio’s community colleges went to one campus, Cuyahoga Community College,

which served the Cleveland metropolitan area.24 Black Ohioans were attending college, but the

overwhelming majority were enrolled in urban community colleges.

There are a number of reasons behind this phenomenon. First, there was a pervasive

sense of racism in Ohio, as in much of the nation, during the 1960s through the 1970s. In Ohio,

although a northern state, as historian Andrew Cayton has argued, “de facto segregation . . . .

flourished in everyday life.”25 Second, through the 1970s, Ohio’s white residents became

increasingly drawn to the Republican Party as Black voters shifted their allegiance to the

Democratic Party, which, except for the last four years of 1970s, would not hold a majority of

both houses in Ohio’s General Assembly for the rest of the century. As a result, political

representation for Ohio’s Black population was increasingly limited. Third, native white

Ohioans were largely segregated from Blacks throughout most of the twentieth century. State

policymakers did not strike down residential segregation until 1965, and by that point white Ohio

residents were leaving large cities for the suburbs as the Black population became heavily

concentrated in metropolitan areas — a separation that feasibly kept any struggles faced by

Black Ohioans hidden from the gaze of white policymakers and citizens.26 Such a level of

systemic neglect and segregation proved to be destructive to the livelihood of Black Ohioans and

created the economic consequences the Regents needed to address.

22 Ohio Board of Regents, “Basic Data Series: 1983,” 62-68.

23 Ibid.

24 Ohio Board of Regents, “Basic Data Series: 1987,” 64. 25 Andrew R.L. Cayton, Ohio: A History of a People (Columbus: The Ohio State University

Press, 2002), 342.

26 Patrick J. Leahy and Nancy Grant, “Racial Residential Segregation in Ohio’s Eight Largest

Cities: 1950-1980,” The Ohio Journal of Science 85, no. 1 (1985): 2-6.

https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/23045/V085N1_002.pdf;jsessionid=538693B8E3009E

644C525505762C1ABB?sequence=1; Adam A. Millsap, “How the Gem City Lost Its Luster and

How It Can Get It Back: A Case Study of Dayton, Ohio,” Mercatus Research, Mercatus Center

at George Mason University, Arlington, VA, 2017.

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/millsap-dayton-ohio-case-study-mr-mercatus-v3.pdf.

70

One of the biggest consequences of Ohio’s de facto segregation was the disproportionate

number of African Americans who were unemployed or out of the labor force entirely, when in

the 1970s, the state’s economy went into recession and opportunities for employment were

largely confined to the service sector. Cayton writes, “The fact that employers in service

industries put a greater emphasis on education and appearance than plant managers meant that

prejudice, conscious or unconscious, affected the hiring of Black men.”27 Black citizens’ lack of

political, economic and educational equality in the previous decades meant that a large portion of

Ohio’s Black population — both men and women — did not possess the same credentials as

whites when applying for service sector jobs. As a result, Black employment conditions did not

improve, generational wealth did not accumulate, and there was less possibility of paying for a

child’s college tuition.

Why did the Regents’ initial 1966 plan not do anything to help Ohio’s low-income Black

women? The Regents and state leaders had largely focused funding towards building two-year

campuses across the state to reach those most geographically isolated from higher education, an

effort that, although funded by bond issues, left the state with a large deficit. The campuses were

built, but state leaders, due to continuing budget constrictions, could not provide individual

financial assistance for students who may have been closer to a college but still couldn’t afford to

enroll. The state offered grants and other forms of scholarships, yet not on a scale that would

help every low-income student in part because the state had some of the highest tuition rates in

the nation. This absence was exacerbated when the manufacturing industry fell, thus limiting the

financial opportunities of the state’s poorest citizens.

The Regents’ initially relied on funding from the Higher Education Amendments of 1972

in the form of grants that would help low-income students with the cost of higher education —

but that source of federal funding disappeared in the early-1980s as Congress slowly phased out

need-based higher education grant and scholarship programs that had been around since the

early-1970s and replaced it with a student-loan system.28 Many students, including those from

low-income backgrounds, were left to the mercy of banks that demanded repayment of a loan

after completing college. In states where budgets were plush enough to provide student aid, the

27 Cayton, Ohio: A History of a People, 342.

28 Lawrence E. Gladieux, "The Issue of Equity in College Finance," Proceedings of the Academy

of Political Science 35, no. 2 (1983): 74.

71

effects of less federal funding were temporarily off-set, but financially-strapped states like Ohio

could offer no such help.

This change in need-based funding meant two things for Ohio’s most disadvantaged

populations. First, students from low-income backgrounds were less likely to attend four-year

colleges without taking on massive amounts of debt to do so — unless, of course, they received

an academic scholarship from the institution or need-based grants that covered a sizeable portion

of their tuition. Second, many non-traditional and low-income students were forced to attend the

lowest priced college while also working to cover living expenses since many, if not most, non-

four-year institutions did not provide residential facilities or work-study jobs that paid above the

poverty line.29 By the early-1980s, Ohio’s leaders had very little funding to provide potential

students with financial aid, a portion of the population without the skills needed for service

sector employment, and no financially feasible way to send students to college without causing

some form of financial hardship or unimaginable debt. These conditions were particularly

devastating to low income and African American Ohioans.

The Displaced Homemakers

A second group identified as being particularly under-enrolled in higher education in Ohio was

recently divorced women and single mothers, identified by one state program as “displaced

homemakers.” The Democratic Party controlled both houses of the Ohio General Assembly

from 1976 to 1980, and despite funding restrictions, the 112th General Assembly passed House

Bill 32 in 1978 to create the Displaced Homemakers program at all three Cuyahoga Community

College (CCC) campuses with roughly $200,000 in state assistance. House Bill 32 called for a

multipurpose service center that provided “health, education, training, job placement, and other

services for displaced homemakers,” an individual the General Assembly defined as thirty-five

years of age or older, has worked without pay because they stayed at home, not currently

employed, or would be likely to struggle finding a job, either deprived of the financial support

they once received from a dependent, or “has become ineligible for public assistance as the

29 Therese L. Baker and William Velez, “Access to and Opportunity in Postsecondary Education

in the United States: A Review,” Sociology of Education 69 (1996): 93.

72

parent of a needy child.”30 One qualified as a displaced homemaker only if they met all those

requirements, or at least one part of each requirement, and in effect the program was targeted for

low-income, unemployed, single mothers. Put differently, the “displaced homemakers” program

is an example of how state legislators in the 1970s began to see higher education’s link to the

new service economy by identifying higher education as a way to improve the economic

participation of a group of people — low-income women — who might well contribute to the

new service economy.

The 1978 Displaced Homemakers program was the state’s first step in addressing how

seriously the recent economic recession had affected low-income women in Ohio. In particular,

Black women have historically been the most marginalized group in the United States and

suffered a disproportionate amount of economic discrimination due to both sexism and racism in

and out of the workplace.31 The Ohio General Assembly acknowledged as much when they

concluded that “minority women are the lowest paid workers in the labor force.”32 Towards that

end, the number of Black and white low-income women had continued to increase since the

1950s. At the same time, divorce rates skyrocketed, which, when combined with inflation, the

loss of jobs that didn’t require higher education and no marketable skills, an overwhelming

percentage of women — almost 80 percent — were confined to employment in low-paying, low-

30 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers: Evaluation Report on the Pilot Program at

Cuyahoga Community College,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 1980, 1. The term

“displaced homemakers” was not coined by the Ohio General Assembly. While no definitive

conclusions can be made about where the term originated, a case can be made that “displaced

homemakers” became popularized when Tish Sommers and Laurie Shields of the National

Organization for Women created a grassroots effort to encourage California lawmakers to create

a Displaced Homemakers program at state-funded colleges and universities and Yvonne Burke, a

member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California introduced a Displaced

Homemakers Bill in 1975. For more on the history of displaced homemakers, see: Barbara H.

Vinick & Ruth H. Jacobs, The Displaced Homemaker: A State-of-the-Art Review (Working paper

/ Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1980).

31 For more information on the economic marginalization in the United States’ economy see:

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from

Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985) and Deborah Gray White, “Making a

Way Out of No Way,” in Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–

1994” (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999).

32 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers: Evaluation Report on the Pilot Program at

Cuyahoga Community College,” 27.

73

status jobs in service industries, clerical fields, and retail sales where they made 60.2 percent of

what men earned.33 Women who worked these occupations lived without health insurance,

retirement plans and maternity leave despite the fact that nearly a fifth of all American women in

the 1970s were the breadwinner for their families.34 According to the Regents, Ohio had 190,000

“displaced homemakers.”35

Ohio’s leaders seemed to take all of this into account when they crafted the Displaced

Homemakers program. The General Assembly mandated that CCC would offer services like job

counseling, job training, assistance in job placement, health services, money management

programs, information on government assistance programs and personal counseling — all with

the intention of helping participants be job ready and, eventually, economically independent in

the new service economy.36 These offerings of the Displaced Homemakers program provided

radical new innovations to higher education which had traditionally focused largely on

academics. Within the program, students had affordable access to gynecological examinations,

appointments with state officials to discuss credit, legal aid, insurance, how to apply for financial

assistance and free counseling with a College psychologist.37 In order to begin the program,

participants were invited to a CCC campus, given a questionnaire to gauge their employment

needs, and provided with job counselling.38 Once students were placed in their program, they

began taking courses to fulfill a degree or certification program and, with the help of their

advisors, found employment.

Ohio’s 112th General Assembly argued that various factors, including access to higher

education, contributed to economic recovery and that state assistance was required in all

recovery efforts. Policymakers understood that central to any recovery effort was access to

higher education, especially for low-income women. No other institution under the control of

Ohio’s state government was in as many places, with the ability to provide as many services, as

the state’s network of colleges and universities. Before the late-1970s and early-1980s, Ohio’s

33 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers,” 27. 34 Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History

of Women in the U.S. (Boston: South End Press, 1996), 107. 35 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers: Evaluation Report on the Pilot Program at

Cuyahoga Community College,” 27. 36 Ibid., 6-7, 8.

37 Ibid., 13-18.

38 Ibid., 12.

74

leaders used public higher education to focus on developing research to expand the state’s

economy to ward off economic recession and provide a way for people to receive an education,

if they wanted it, and if they could access it. In this earlier vision, public higher education in

Ohio was most valuable to the state because of what it could produce. However, by the late-

1970s, Ohio policy makers identified public higher education as most valuable to the state

because of how it could contribute to the state’s economic recovery.

Ohio’s General Assembly asked the Board of Regents to create a job training program for

low-income women that specifically focused on teaching the skills needed for service-sector

careers. More specifically, the General Assembly mandated that the “center’s program shall

include training for: employment counselors in social service agencies, home health technicians

with skills in nutrition, basic health care, and nursing for the disabled and elderly; health care

counselors for employment in hospital out-patient and community clinics, especially in the

counseling of middle-aged patients.”39 Most of the careers listed by the General Assembly were

commonly known as “pink collar” jobs, or jobs that were traditionally held by women in the

service economy.

Aside from what the Displaced Homemakers program would teach, the question of why

the General Assembly chose Cuyahoga Community College still deserves some clarification.

First, CCC was the largest community college in Ohio both in terms of enrollment and number

of campuses. In 1979, Cuyahoga County consisted of wealthy, mostly white suburbs, a densely

populated city where African Americans made up a majority of the residents, and working-class

neighborhoods throughout the western half of the county. CCC had a campus in each of these

areas. Second, Cleveland’s Metropolitan area was the largest in the state and had one of the

highest unemployment rates for women. In fact, Metropolitan Cleveland’s poverty rate in 1980

was nearly 34 percent and recent studies show that women accounted for half of that number,

meaning roughly 16 percent of the women in and around Cleveland were living under the

poverty line at a time when no more than 7 percent of women in the United States were living in

poverty.40

39 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers: Evaluation Report on the Pilot Program at

Cuyahoga Community College,” 83.

40 Mark J. Salling, Cleveland Neighborhood Conditions and Trends, a report published by the

Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2001, 22.

75

The Regents and General Assembly chose to pilot the Displaced Homemakers program at

Cuyahoga Community College because, according to the Regents, “of known needs for this kind

of program in the Cleveland area and because of the College’s on-going commitment to

programs for women.”41 Since the Displaced Homemakers Program was piloted in both urban

and suburban areas with a high proportion of unemployed women, particularly African American

women, the program effectively became a way to assist the entry of low-income women into

higher education and back into the workforce.

The program’s first year proved to be a success. According to data collected by the

Regents, more than half the Displaced Homemakers program graduates went on to find

employment.42 The Regents were pleased that “243 displaced homemakers…are now employed

have become contributing members of society…instead of needing public assistance for

themselves they are now, through their tax dollars, providing assistance for others.”43 One

women who graduated from the program said, “I thought I was past the age of studying. This

program gave me the courage to start forward with credits toward a degree in nursing.”44

There’s plenty to learn from the Displaced Homemakers program, especially when

studying the influence of state policy on public higher education. The Regents and General

Assembly were, for the most part, in sync with what they believed was best for the state’s

economic recovery and what role public higher education would play. In the 1940s and 1950s,

state leaders widely ignored the recommendation to expand public higher education for research

development. As public higher education became more centralized in the 1960s, the General

Assembly and Governors began to play outsized roles in their influence over policies that pulled

economic recovery, job training and Ohio’s public colleges and universities together.

The lesson here is simple but profoundly important to the success of centralized state

systems of public higher education: policymakers and the governing bodies of higher education

must be on the same page, have a functional relationship, be aware of their state’s economic

climate and consider ways public colleges and universities can both prevent economic stagnation

and respond accordingly to economic downturn. By the mid-1980s, most state systems of public

41 Ohio Board of Regents, “Displaced Homemakers: Evaluation Report on the Pilot Program at

Cuyahoga Community College,” 2.

42 Ibid., 54. 43 Ibid., 2.

44 Ibid., 61.

76

higher education were no longer loosely bound and autonomous. They were collectively

connected and seen as a viable public institution whose purpose, in part, was to provide for the

public good. What’s perhaps most tragic about this new arrangement is that it wasn’t destined to

last, regardless of how effective it could be.

A New Social Compact

Given the state’s high unemployment rate in the late-1970s, the Regents believed more could be

done to assist Ohioans. The original emphasis they placed on “missing students” slowly

expanded through the early-1980s to encompass a statewide program of career development,

skills training, and off-the-job continuing education that attempted to turn public higher

education into a for-profit public service. Aside from proving through the Displaced

Homemakers program that Ohioans would use public higher education for economic

improvement, a potential factor leading to the Regents and General Assembly’s decision to use

higher education as an avenue towards economic recovery was the changing public perception of

the value of college and university study. According to the Regents’ 1982 Master Plan, Ohioans

were coming around to the idea that there is a “high correlation between higher levels of

education and higher lifetime earnings,” that “college graduates generally suffer lower

unemployment during difficult economic times,” and that “a college degree is a valuable asset to

older persons reentering the job market and continuing education helps persons upgrade their

employment skills in a rapidly changing technological society.”45

By the early-1980s, the Regents’ case for adapting higher education for economic

development was gaining ground in the state. In 1982, of the 325,000 adults enrolled in both

non-credit and vocational education programs across the state, 10,400 were enrolled in one-year

certification programs — a significant increase since 1978.46 What’s more, roughly 300,000

people were in non-credit programs and of those 300,000, more than ten percent were taking

non-credit courses at a technical campus.47 These enrollment increases pointed to several key

developments, the most important being that Ohioans also saw the value of higher education for

45 Ohio Board of Regents, “Master Plan for Higher Education: Opportunity in a Time of Change:

1982,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 8.

46 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Economic Outlook: 1982,” Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, 10.

47 Ibid., 12.

77

economic improvement and recovery. The Regents reported that some companies were

sponsoring continuing education programs for their employees through higher education.

Nonetheless, some of Ohio’s largest companies were meeting their own training needs and didn’t

have a relationship with their local college or university.48 The case of company supported

education, which sidestepped formal higher education, was not unique to Ohio in this period. In

1982, at the national level, more than 72 percent of the students participating in postsecondary

education, or any type of education after receiving a high school diploma, were learning through

non-school organizations instead of colleges and universities. Private companies were spending

just as much on their own in-house training and instruction than colleges students were spending

on traditional higher education.49 Through the early 1980s, more employees across America

were being re-trained and skilled by their companies who spent just as much on continuing

education programs as traditional college students did on public higher education.

Yet Ohio remained behind the nation in this aspect of company training. The Regents

found that less than one percent of Ohio’s companies provided their employees with an in-house

training program, and, consequently, public colleges and universities were in a strong position to

develop programs for those in the labor force with limited access to development and training

opportunities.50 If the Regents could find a way to make a business-public higher education

partnership work, the payoff could be lucrative and help provide much needed funding to

institutions. But the Regents had to convince Ohio’s legislative leaders to fund such programs

through the state’s colleges and universities.

To convince policymakers of this option, in a 1982 proposal, the Regents’ played-up the

extent of Ohio’s economic downturn and public higher education’s potential ability to help the

economy recover. “It is our conviction,” writes the Regents, “that Ohio must organize for

unusual efforts throughout the balance of the century…Indeed, given the knowledge-based

character of the technological explosion in which we find ourselves, Ohio must likely organize

for concerted common efforts throughout the foreseeable future.”51 The Regents’ reported to

48 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Economic Outlook: 1982,” 22.

49 Ohio Board of Regents, “Employer-Sponsored Instruction: Focus on Ohio Business and

Industry,” Ohio Southwest Regional Depository, 1982, 1.

50 Ibid., 37-38.

51 Ohio Board of Regents, “A Proposal to Establish the Ohio Business, Education and

Government Alliance,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 1982, 1.

78

state leaders that Ohio’s biggest cities were “severely declining,” the economy was “structurally

weak” due to over-reliance on heavy industry, and that “economic revitalization will depend

largely upon the further development of emerging technologies,” which could only happen

through policy-based action.52 Yet, if the General Assembly approved the Regents’ mandate for

a business, education and government alliance, then an appointed committee would do the leg

work of directing research on emerging technologies, work with businesses to train their

employees to create a more skilled labor force, and lead the way towards economic

revitalization.53

To convince public colleges and universities to fundamentally alter their programming,

the Regents relied primarily on guilt and the possibility of financial incentive. The Regents’

argued that public colleges and universities had not done enough to reach the general public and

believed that efforts from these institutions “should be dramatically expanded and intensified” in

order to reach “society at large” by “extending its instructional and research resources to

individuals and groups not normally viewed as within the academic community.”54 Towards that

end, the Regents asserted that the “fortunes of higher education in Ohio…are inextricably linked

to the fortunes of the state as a whole,” and “Ohio’s colleges and universities should therefore be

willing and determined to help the state meet its current challenges.”55 The Regents described

this step as a “renewed attention to services rendered to the larger society” that would require

public higher education institutions to “conduct a broad review of its own instructional, research,

and public service activities with a view to enhancing relationships with the developmental

interests of the state.”56 Such a goal, the Regents contended, could be achieved by colleges and

universities focusing on educating and serving local residents, government institutions and

businesses through a cooperative relationship.57

In making this recommendation, the Regents were following what it deemed to be a “new

social compact” in which the economic needs of the state and the strengths of higher education

52 Ibid., 3.

53 Ibid., 14-15. 54 Ohio Board of Regents, “Opportunity in a Time of Change,” Southwest Ohio Regional

Depository, 1984, 9.

55 Ibid., 10.

56 Ibid., 27.

57 Ibid., 15, 29.

79

intersected. Colleges and universities should partner with businesses, health care professions,

labor, government and industrial leaders to, according to the Regents, “promote advancement of

the quality of life in Ohio.”58 The plan called for faculty and administrators to make a front-end

investment on three tenants of higher education — instruction, research and public service — to

“expand the public’s appreciation of higher education,” which would result in Ohioans seeing

how much of a payoff higher education is and would then be eager to “fund college and

university service activities.”59 In this call for higher education’s contribution, the state admitted

that it did not have the funding to pilot “the new social compact” program across the state, but

that the notion of such a social contract was “not unlike the long-accepted concept of student and

state sharing the cost of instruction in which both benefit.”60

The regents’ proposal did offer a different kind of support for higher education in the

form of enrollment increases. State enrollments had declined since the mid-1970s and,

according to the Regents’ plan, colleges and universities could mitigate those losses, and be of

more public service, by reaching more non-traditional students through recruitment. This was

their theory, although in fact, non-traditional students were more likely to be employed, or have

an employment schedule that conflicted with course work. Such students were also more likely

to have families and were less incentivized to make the financial sacrifice of tuition.

Unfortunately, most colleges and universities never got the chance to take on the

Regent’s charge of developing and enrolling workers in off-the-job training programs. At the

same time that the Regents were lobbying the state for this funding, Jim Rhodes was locked in a

budget war with the divided General Assembly. While Democrats kept control of the lower-

chamber for the 1981-1982 session, Republicans won the Senate, which set-off an ideological

battle over state spending and tax increases. Rhodes had been re-elected twice on the promise of

“no new taxes” that favored well with the Senate and angered House Democrats who believed

that the state needed increased state spending but only with increased taxes.61 With the state in

such a deep recession, Rhodes had no choice but to increase taxes. A budget for 1982 finally

arrived the fall of 1981 —albeit after two interim budgets and four-months after the agreed-upon

58 Ohio Board of Regents, “Opportunity in a Time of Change,” 10.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid. 61 Leonard, “Rhodes Second Eight Years, 1975-1983,” in Lamis and Usher, eds., Ohio Politics,

155.

80

deadline — that increased spending by 22 percent and increased the sales tax from 4 to 5.1

percent.62 Rhodes reluctantly signed the budget in late-1981, but threatened spending cuts of

nearly 30 percent if the General Assembly didn’t provide a 1983 budget with less spending and

more agreeable tax increases.63 In late-1982, Rhodes got what he wanted. The 1983 budget cut

state spending by more than ten percent with four percent cuts to education.64 The Regents’

legislative proposal for a social contract between business and higher education over job training

never made it past the House floor.

Conclusion: Toward a Working Ohio

In the 1960s, the Regents and General Assembly wondered why enrollment at Ohio’s state-

assisted colleges and universities had not increased like they were with the Baby Boom

generation in other states. By the 1970s, both groups faced a more challenging problem of an

economic recession and increasing financial limitations facing potential college students. How

the Regents and General Assembly imagined the use of Ohio’s public colleges and universities

during the ten years between 1976 and 1983 discloses several realities about contemporary

higher education that policymakers should take to heart. Above all else, public higher education

is co-dependent on the economic and political health of a state. Policymakers can decide to cut

funding to higher education in order to save money, but the ensuing tuition hikes will not only

create a financial burden for the most economically vulnerable populations, it will deny

thousands in the labor force the ability to grow their skills and engage in career mobility. And if

policymakers decide to provide more funding to higher education for the sake of economic

improvement, the investment must be long-term and far-reaching. But more investment in

higher education also needs to be tied back to the investors — the students who attend public

colleges and universities.

Public higher education is also the place where most of the state’s interests converge.

Low-income students need access to public colleges and universities for employment-based

training, lower-middle-class students need higher education for career mobility, and the state

needs both of these groups to be financially self-sufficient to ensure economic stability while

62 Leonard, “Rhodes Second Eight Years, 1975-1983,” 155.

63 Ibid., 157.

64 Ibid., 158.

81

universities need funding for research to create innovating technologies that, in time, can help

state economies, and its’ labor force, grow. Moreover, policymakers cannot use public higher

education as a political weapon. The economic consequences are too steep. State systems of

public higher education are both a curse and a blessing because they can be used by partisans to

make an expedient political point, or wielded to empower a state’s population in an efficient,

productive way.

Finally, every interest holder involved with public colleges and universities —

policymakers, faculty, students and companies — needs to understand that higher education does

not just have one purpose. The Ohio Board of Regents understood as much when they crafted a

state system that focused on both access and academic prestige. In 1975, Ohio’s system of

public higher education did not have all the elements necessary to be accessible to anyone who

wanted a post-secondary education. Multiple governing agencies attempted to correct this

problem by trying to expand the number of technical and vocational education centers, offering

state-supported programs to reach low-income populations, re-thinking how faculty could teach

students who already had full-time employment, and conceptualizing a business-higher

education relationship that focused exclusively on statewide economic development. The

problem is that each of these attempts were viewed by some to be inherently political or were

suggested during the state’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. None of the

attempts to repurpose Ohio higher education would fundamentally alter the character of the

system — they merely represented a belief that Ohio higher education could do so much more.

82

CHAPTER FIVE

TOWARDS THE YEAR 2000

Selective Investment

The rest of the 1980s proved to be just as challenging for Ohio higher education as the first half

of the decade. By 1984 unemployment had reached a recessionary peak of 12.5 percent, state

per capita income fell from 15th in the nation to 25th, and the state had one of the lowest

population growth rates in the country.1 As a result of the state’s 1982 budget deficit, the Board

of Regents, along with the newly elected Governor, Richard Celeste, and the General Assembly,

agreed that the state should incentivize individual higher education institutions to either create

new research programs or to excel in undergraduate education, a strategy they called ‘selective

investment.’2 This chapter examines how the Regents still had a role in governing the state’s

colleges and universities, and argues that the 1980s ushered in a new era where institutions were

given more autonomy and responsibility to find their own sources of funding. The state could no

longer be the main financial supporter of higher education. It was up to the individual

institutions to find the means to pay the bulk of their bills.

Despite significant financial limitations, the Regent’s proposal for ‘selective investment’

largely mirrored their longstanding belief that public higher education in Ohio should be both

accessible and academically prestigious. Public two-year and four-year institutions could earn

the Program Excellence Award, which provided a one-time enrichment grant of roughly

$136,000 to the college or university with the best undergraduate program.3 The criteria used to

select a winning institution, according to the Regents, was that their undergraduate program

provided an education that “facilitates personal intellectual development, preparation to gain

employment and mature in a career, the ability to achieve economic and social mobility, and a

1 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume 1,”

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 1988, 21.

2 Ibid., 20.

3 Ibid.

83

commitment to community service.”4 By including two-year public institutions, the Regents

reaffirmed that students could receive a quality education somewhere other than a public four-

year college or university. The Regents’ also hoped that their strategy would encourage public

two-year institutions to improve their education programs by prioritizing academic planning and

focusing on an institutional mission.5 Two-year institutions could also receive funding by

focusing on excellence in classroom instruction, which would qualify them for a funds to build

instructional centers for the professional development of new faculty, and create job training

programs with local high schools that encouraged students to pursue a college degree.6

The main emphasis of the ‘selective investment’ program, however, was to encourage

public four-year institutions to build a more prestigious academic reputation. The Regents thus

maintained their historic interest in making public higher education in Ohio more elite in terms

of research and development in order to attract distinguished faculty and contracts from budding

industries and the federal government. This priority is reflected in the amount of research

funding earmarked by Regents during the mid-to-late-1980s. From 1984 to 1989, the state

earmarked nearly $64 million dollars for public higher education to “increase research activity

by supporting projects with a very high probability for attracting additional funds from business,

industry, and the federal government,” and to bring to four-year institutions “Ohio’s strongest

academic departments outstanding faculty members who have achieved national and

international prominence for their teaching, scholarship, and research.”7 In comparison, the state

only allocated $17 million for programs that specifically applied to two-year institutions despite

the fact nearly as many students enrolled at two-year colleges and universities as four-year

institutions.

The emphasis on increased prestige corresponded with an increased level of institutional

autonomy, and some campus leaders were pleased to know that they could promote innovation at

their institution, be financially rewarded for doing a good job, and not have to deal with state

regulation. E. Fred Carlisle, the Provost at Miami University, said as much in a speech given to

the University of Wisconsin System Conference on Assessment in 1988:

4 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume 1,”

22.

5 Ibid., 19.

6 Ibid., 21. 7 Ibid., 21.

84

“Selective Excellence is nicely balanced between statewide challenge and

institutional definition of strength and priority. It balances, as well, state-wide

requirements for demonstration with internal choices of specific means. It

provided resources directly to academic programs. It spends money, in other

words, to challenge and reward, not to establish elaborate statewide regulatory

systems for assessing higher education. It focuses attention on achievement and

improvement… Above all, it protects the integrity of the campus.”8

The decision to give individual institutions more autonomy represents yet another example of

Ohio’s leaders sidestepping a national trend in American higher education. Historians of

American higher education generally agree that the federal government played an outsized role

in financially stabilizing colleges and universities in the two decades after World War II.9 By the

mid-1970s, state governments also took on more financial responsibility for the public colleges

and universities in their state. Since state governments do not share the same level of wealth as

the federal government, and some states produce far less wealth than others, a new era of

financial inequality began in American higher education. Most states could not provide a

consistent stream of financial assistance to public institutions, which resulted in higher tuition

costs for students and the growth of a fundraising bureaucracy at nearly every college and

university. Ohio, however, never shouldered the financial burden of funding its public

institutions, in part because it could not afford to.

The Regents’ decision to reward individual institutions for technological innovation and

other forms of academic research can be viewed as an attempt to build wealth through

performance funding, a process which “connects state appropriations directly to a college s

performance on outcomes such as student retention [and] graduation.”10 The primary issue with

performance funding is the stress it places on institutions that simply don’t have the financial,

material or intellectual resources to compete with larger, better funded schools.11 In a statewide

8 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume 1,”

20.

9 Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 219-220.

10 Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya M. Jones, Hana Lahr, Rebecca S. Natow, Lara Pheatt, and

Vikash Reddy, "Performance Funding for Higher Education: Forms, Origins, Impacts, and

Futures," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 655, (2014): 163-

84.

11 Kevin J. Dougherty, Sosanya M. Jones, Hana Lahr, Rebecca S. Natow, Lara Pheatt, and

Vikash Reddy, Obstacles to the Effective Implementation of Performance Funding in Community

Colleges in Three States (New York, NY: Community College Research Center, Teachers

85

system, performance funding rewards those institutions that had a head start from decades of

accumulating wealth and academic reputation. Some American colleges and universities became

more financially self-sufficient in the 1980s and 19990s due to their contributions to research

development and the financial rewards they received in return. David Labaree described the

recent history of American higher education as the development of a three-pronged criterion that

colleges and universities have to meet in order to be considered ‘elite’ or ‘prestigious’ that

includes a university’s age, competitive undergraduate and graduate admission, and a strong

enough academic program to reap the rewards of research funding on a consistent basis.12

By these categories, most public colleges and universities in the United States aren’t

considered elite, prestigious or competitive. Nonetheless, some public institutions remain highly

competitive. In the 1980s, the Regents recognized as much and seemed to place their focus and

funding support on the institutions most likely to gain the most prestige, lure the most interest

from companies, and make enough money to reinvest in Ohio’s economy. The selective

investment and performance funding initiatives of the 1980s marked the start of a trend that

would make Ohio higher education more inequitable and solidify the boundaries between

institutions that provide access and those that carry academic prestige — for better or worse.

Toward the Year 2000

In a 1988 report, the Regents argued that selective investment was the model for higher

education’s future. The Regents identified “a transition for higher education,” in which

“economic resurgence and sustained competitiveness are dependent on the focused strengths of

higher education research, teaching, and service.” 13 Under selective investment, Ohio higher

education would “develop new knowledge; transfer that knowledge to new products and

services; [and] prepare individuals for a lifetime of learning and adapting to career changes.”14

Moreover, the days of students “preparing for careers that would provide entry-level job

College, Columbia University, 2014).

https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/media/k2/attachments/obstacles-to-performance-funding-

implementation.pdf.

12 David Labaree, A Perfect Mess, 9.

13 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume II,”

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 1988, 6.

14 Ibid.

86

opportunities” were fading as higher education came to be has perceived “as the foundation on

which to build the research, innovation, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship needed to

revitalize the state’s economy.”15 Public higher education in Ohio would not stop assisting those

who wanted skilled credentials for employment; but public higher education would also focus

more on making Ohio’s economy more competitive.

The Regents had a good reason for their proposed new direction for public higher

education. The Great Lakes region of the Midwest no longer had a competitive advantage in

manufacturing and, according to the Regents, the growing service industry in Ohio mostly

brought low-to-mid-wage jobs in areas like hospitality, health services and business services.16

An analysis of Ohio’s top employers from 1990 to 2010 shows that the state’s two largest

employers during that period were the Cleveland Clinic and Wal-Mart while three of the top four

employers were in the health services industry. Even if more students received a two-year

degree, the choice they had for employment was limited. The Regents were falling back on their

original plan of attracting new industries to the state through public higher education’s advanced

research productivity, which would create a wider variation of jobs that would require more post-

secondary education. This approach was nothing short of a gamble. But what choice did the

Regents have? Ohio’s standard of living could not grow on Wal-Mart wages.

In addition, colleges and universities in other states were using their research capabilities

to earn contracts with knowledge-based industries and the United States’ military that were

critical to the development and expansion of new economic sectors — a fact that the Regents

used to build their argument for Ohio to refocus higher education.17 In the Great Lakes region of

the Midwest, states were taking a similar route through spending on industrial research, and Ohio

had not kept up with that pattern. By 1985, Ohio’s level of spending on industrial research had

dropped 0.2 percent while the national spending average grew 68 percent, Illinois’ by 36 percent,

and 31 percent in Michigan.18 If Ohio could increase the level of investment in applied industrial

research, the Regents believed that the development of new technologies, processes and products

15 Ibid., 6, 7. 16 Ibid., 14.

17 Ibid., 15.

18 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume II,”

15.

87

would “have a significant impact on the inter-connections of economic growth, human resource

development, and the quality of life.”19

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how Ohio needed to invest in applied industrial research

because the term covers dozens of industries and occupations. The Regents’ seemed equally

unsure. They suggested that Ohio’s colleges and universities should make investments in

“growth industries,” which included “information and communication, new materials,

biotechnologies, health and medical technologies, and factory and office automation.”20 To be

more specific, the Regents suggested that public higher education do everything it could to train

workers, produce research and build relationships with firms in areas like computer information

processing, synthetic construction materials, plant and animal genetic engineering, agricultural

food production, industrial chemicals, neurochemistry and immunology, programmable robotics,

integrated systems of inventory control, and integrated systems development.21 The only theme

holding all of these various industries together is the fact Ohio had fallen behind in each of them.

There’s no indication that the Regents expected one industry to thrive over the other, but rather

that they merely wanted an industry to thrive.

One of the biggest hurdles in attempting economic transformation through the

development of new industries is the logistical challenge of re-educating the labor force and

building new programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In a way, this was the

never-ending problem for Ohio in the last-half of the twentieth century: policymakers engaged in

a reactionary restructuring of public higher education and job training because of the

continuously changing economy. The late-1980s were no different. The Regents argued that

“Ohio’s people are woefully underprepared for the economic changes” because the state “ranked

last among the Great Lakes states in production of scientists and engineers,” and “a significant

number of youth and adults, particularly those with long-term unemployment are functionally

illiterate.”22 Certainly the state had invested in vocational and educational education programs.

But, according to the Regents, “leading U.S. industries, many of which are Ohio’s growth

industries, have upgraded their educational requirements considerably” and the state education

19 Ibid., 18.

20 Ibid., 20.

21 Ibid., 21-22. 22 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume II,”

26.

88

system had not kept up in preparation for that type of work.23 Without a new direction in public

higher education, the Regents believed that Ohio’s workers would suffer job loss, perform

unskilled, low-wage labor, or be a lifelong displaced worker.24

The Regents’ belief in public higher education’s role — or in some cases, necessity —

for gainful employment predicted a contemporary dilemma in the American economy. In the

early-1980s, with the loss of industrial jobs and good pay, millions of Americans were left with

little options for high-wage employment without a college credential that correlated with the

skills needed for a particular job. That is not to say that every American needed post-secondary

education, but the type of post-secondary education each person needed varied case-by-case.

There are plenty of unskilled careers that provide a good income. However, the number of jobs a

person qualifies for is directly connected to their skill level. And a large number of industries

require skills for their employees that are hard to learn outside of higher education — especially

if employers require an employee’s skills to be validated by certification. The Regents noticed

this trend beginning in the late-1980s, and today economists and scholars predict that 64 percent

of all jobs in the United States will require some form of higher education or post-secondary

certification.25

In their 1988 report, the Regents’ claimed they had a plan to address these concerns that

included four goals: affordability, accessibility, better teaching at the undergraduate level, and

more emphasis in graduate education — all in an effort to make colleges and universities more

responsible and autonomous, which meant making institutions less reliant on the state for

funding. First, higher education needed to be more affordable. The Regents’ acknowledged that

the cost of attending a public college or university was impossible for a large segment of Ohio’s

population. In order to reduce the share of costs put on students, the Regents planned to petition

the state for more student financial aid programs. Second, the academic rigor of traditional

higher education — taking courses towards a terminal degree — seemed to be too much for a lot

of students coming from schools that did not have college preparation curriculum, or those

23 Ibid., 27.

24 Ibid.

25 United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment Rates and Earnings by Educational

Attainment, 2016 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office).

https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2016/data-on-display/education-matters.htm.

89

students who just wanted training for a specific job. The Regents wanted public college and

university leaders “to work in concert with local school superintendents to strengthen curricula

and teaching in the areas of mathematics, science, and writing.”26 There were also plans to open

local collaborative laboratories where leaders from every level of education would gather

together, create a plan of action for college preparation, and hopefully increase the rate of

acceptance and retention in higher education.27

A third goal articulated by the Regents to be achieved by the year 2000 was a broad and

vague vision of leadership. By “leadership,” the Regents meant that colleges and universities

needed to identify, enhance, and mobilize the state’s economic and intellectual strength to

promote change.28 This unspecific and unwieldy initiative included changing the “state’s

expectations for its higher education system” to provide “adequate instructional quality and

accessibility.”29 The Regents wanted public higher education to “shape the society’s agenda for

change,” to discover “the harmonies that exist between higher education’s strengths and the

needs of society,” and to raise the “spirit of excellence to a higher level of consciousness rather

than managing closely the negative realities of decline, complexity, and ambiguity.”30

The Regents’ blueprint for achieving their identified new goals were just as vague as the

goals themselves. When discussing how to improve undergraduate education, the Regents said

that the “key to the continued improvement in the quality of undergraduate education will be the

identification and dissemination of information about program characteristics which contribute

significantly to its quality.”31 The Board of Regents also perceived significant opportunities for

academic and scholarly excellence in new graduate programs through collaborative

arrangements, especially at the doctoral level.32 The Regents never actually address how

colleges and universities should go about achieving specific goals, nor do they provide further

specifics about what terms such as “collaborative arrangements” or “program characteristics”

26 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume

III,” Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 1988, 28.

27 Ibid., 28.

28 Ibid., 9.

29 Ibid., 8.

30 Ibid., 9.

31 Ibid., 14.

32 Ohio Board of Regents, “Towards the Year 2000: Higher Education in Transition: Volume

III,” 19.

90

mean. Regardless of how much autonomy the Regents wanted to give individual institutions to

plan their own future, the lack of a details about how to move forward only places more of a

burden on colleges and universities, and provides state policymakers with little incentive to move

forward.

The Regents had authorized institutions to be responsible enough to produce new

research and development without more oversight. Undergraduate enrollments had recovered

from recession-era lows. The percentage of the population either taking courses at a post-

secondary institution or had a post-secondary degree had increased by two percent since 1975.33

The economy seemed to be recovering. The issue of cost was still a problem for Ohioans

seeking to attend public higher education, but federal financial aid programs had provided

enough assistance to not significantly harm enrollments.

Conclusion: K-12’s K.O. of Higher Education

If there was a perceived crisis in education in the 1980s and 1990s, it was in elementary and

secondary education, not higher education. In 1983 the Reagan Administration released one of

the most damning reports on American K-12 education ever produced, A Nation at Risk, and by

the 1990s Ohio Republicans were making the report’s recommendations state policy. The

report’s authors declared "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded

by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people," and that

national curriculums needed to be more rigorous, teachers should be better trained, and schools

would be better off if they were held to higher standards.34 Through the rest of the 1980s and

into the 1990s, state governments shifted their focus to increase per-pupil expenditures and set

education standards that included statewide assessments.35 Ohio was no different. According to

Kevin F. Kern and Gregory S. Wilson, elementary and secondary education reform became a

critical issue for Ohio Republicans in the 1990s because they believed public schools were

33 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Public Higher Education Basic Data Series: 1993 Edition,”

Southwest Ohio Regional Depository, 11. 34 The National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for

Educational Reform, April 1983. https://www.edreform.com/wp-

content/uploads/2013/02/A_Nation_At_Risk_1983.pdf.

35 Jeffrey R. Henig, The End of Exceptionalism in American Education (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard Education Press, 2013), 107-120.

91

failing students.36 This emphasis intensified with the 1990 election of Republican Governor

George V. Voinovich, a fiscal conservative who believed more money should be spent on K-12

education, that K-12 curriculum should be more challenging and that “education results” should

“be demanded, measured, and rewarded.”37 Moreover, Voinovich vowed to increase state

spending on K-12 education by 5 percent and increase spending every fiscal year to increase the

state’s per pupil expenditure.38

Concerns about the quality and purpose of public higher education in Ohio didn’t

disappear, however. Instead, the purpose of higher education was once again molded to fit

another political vision. Voinovich, like nearly all of his predecessors, believed that public

higher education should balance quality and affordability, be open to all Ohioans, and upgrade its

research mission.39 To create more access to higher education, Voinovich sought and received

legislative limits on tuition increases and also put state funding towards need-based and merit-

based scholarships.40 These changes didn’t mean that public colleges and universities were

receiving more funding. In fact, college and university budgets were cut, primarily at the

graduate level, in order for the state to limit tuition hikes and offer more financial aid to students.

Voinovich’s advisors, as well as the Board of Regents, suggested that the state should

review doctoral programs and faculty workloads to identify and stop wasteful spending, and the

task should be completed by the colleges and universities and then reported back to the Regents.

During his 1994 State of the State Address, Voinovich celebrated what he viewed as the

approach’s early success stating:

“My hat is off to Ohio’s colleges and universities, which have accepted the

challenge to cut costs and refocus their missions as laid out in the Board of

Regents’ Securing the Future report and recommendations from their individual

Operations Improvement Task Forces. Already, new efficiency measures are

saving millions of dollars on campuses across the state—duplicate courses and

subject majors are being consolidated or cut altogether—and, thanks to your

efforts, undergraduate faculty members are spending more time where our

students need them most—in the classroom.”

36 Kern & Wilson, Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State, 477.

37 Florence Clark Riffe, Words & Deeds: The Achievements of Governor George V. Voinovich

(Athens: Ohio University Special Publications, 1999), 87.

38 Ibid., 87, 88.

39 Ibid., 117.

40 Ibid., 118.

92

It seems odd that the Regents would support Voinovich’s call for spending cuts on campuses and

his de-emphasis on graduate education after years of asking state leaders for the complete

opposite, but the reality is that the Regents didn’t have much of a choice in the matter and access

to undergraduate education had already suffered years of neglect from state leaders. If it took a

crisis in public elementary and secondary education to make state leaders care about access to

public higher education, then the Regents would do what they could to make the situation work

to their benefit. It’s also important to remember that the Regents were established to act in an

advisory role to the Governor on matters relating to higher education. They can make

suggestions, but they do not have legislative authority. The Regents also have a responsibility to

carry out tasks given to them by the Governor.

Voinovich believed that the cost of tuition at Ohio’s public colleges and universities was

the primary issue at hand. If the state’s new emphasis on improving K-12 education worked,

then more students would have the ability to access higher education. But this could only

happen if the cost of getting a post-secondary education at a public institution was manageable.

Colleges and universities would then make up the loss of tuition dollars by enrolling more

students, since a larger portion of Ohio’s under-eighteen population would be academically

prepared for higher education. In other words, Ohio’s public colleges and universities would

increase revenue by cutting the cost of tuition.

93

CHAPTER SIX

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

In less than thirty years Ohio built a centralized system of public higher education that included

an unprecedented number of enrollees across twelve state colleges and universities, two medical

colleges, eight community colleges, seventeen technical institutions and twenty-three branch

campuses.

Governor Rhodes’ ideological transformation led him to reject the traditional elitism of

higher education and be more supportive of two-year vocational and technological training.

Although, Rhodes’ views were influenced by national changes in the Republican Party and

caused him to clash with the Regents, other state leaders failed to realize that the state could not

afford to maintain financial support of its twenty-three public institutions and their students due

to a declining tax base, diminished revenue from enrollments, and a stagnating economy. As a

result, most public four-year institutions increased tuition, which pushed more students — at

least those who could afford it — to enroll at two-year community colleges and branch

campuses. During that time Ohio also experienced a disproportionate amount of out-migration,

lost more than half of its jobs in manufacturing, a decline in personal income, and an economic

recession that nearly bankrupted the state.

Ohio’s leaders responded to the late-1970s/early-1980s recession by emphasizing that

access and job training should be the purpose of public higher education. The recession and

repurposing of public higher education also forced state leaders to confront the plight of Black

Ohioans, and the way that public higher education was still far from being accessible for the

state’s most disadvantaged populations. State leaders had hoped that public higher education

could retrain the workforce for an emerging service sector, but that task was nearly impossible

because of the “missing students” who had fell into a cycle of unemployment due to racism,

economic downturn and deindustrialization. The effort to link public higher education with the

new workforce ultimately failed in the 1980s because of changing political leadership and

economic values in the state. Just when it seemed that state leaders could adapt higher education

94

to address economic and demographic changes, ideological changes in the General Assembly

and a new round of budget deficits prevented any further action.

By the late-1980s, Ohio’s leaders changed their plan for public higher education to one of

“selective investment” which proposed that colleges and universities would receive extra funding

from the state if they achieved a goal that the Regents’ created. Funding for higher education

now had to be earned through schools competing with one another to see who would receive the

extra money. Simultaneously, the national crisis around K-12 education diverted state spending

away from public higher education because Republican leaders like Governor Voinovich

believed that increased attention on public education would prepare more students for college,

which could increase enrollments and provide a new source of funding for public higher

education. Policymakers opted to provide what remaining funding they had to institutions that

excelled in areas like research and undergraduate education. All state leaders proved, however,

was that public higher education could not achieve a purpose without consistent financial support

from the state.

The problems facing Ohio’s public higher education in the post-war era center on the

failure of political leaders to address economic challenges in the state. Immediately after World

War II, Ohio’s leaders waited too long to invest in public higher education because they thought

that inviting new industries to the state would cannibalize business profits in manufacturing,

despite the growing emphasis on aerospace and technological development. Then state leaders

argued for advanced research and industry-based training in higher education, an effort which

largely failed because Ohio did not have a tradition of investing in higher education or the

bureaucratic ability to manage a centralized system of public higher education. That same

tradition of not supporting public higher education was also shared by the general public through

the late-1960s and mid-1970s. A segment of Ohio’s population found higher education to be

elitist and a source of the state’s on-going problems, and ultimately, Governor Rhodes adopted

this suspicion of advanced higher education. Meanwhile, the General Assembly was

ideologically divided when bi-partisan action might have helped revive a recessive economy. By

the 1980s and 1990s, national trends to support K-12 education led to continued reversals in

public higher education support.

Although these storylines tell us how one decision led to another, they don’t explain why

Ohio’s leaders and population acted like they did towards public higher education. Behind

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nearly every decision regarding Ohio’s economy, and what purpose public higher education

should serve, was a regional, or, in some cases, national problem that influenced policymaking.

The decisions made by Ohio’s leaders in this study were invariably swayed by factors beyond

the state’s borders. Ohio’s World War II-era policymakers did not invest in public higher

education because the federal government already had substantial manufacturing-based contracts

in Ohio and Ohio leaders did not see a pressing need for research in new industries. Most of

Ohio’s population had plenty of good paying jobs in heavy industry and manufacturing, there

were no signs of economic stagnation on the horizon, and transitioning the state’s economy away

from manufacturing would have been economically impractical. “Silicon Valley” and the “Sun

Belt” were not yet a threat.

As the state’s economy changed in the 1960s and 70s, the Board of Regents were not able

to recreate and regenerate higher education for the new economy. State initiatives were

financially limited by the state’s lack of a personal income tax to financially assist the most

disadvantaged students. Initially, the cost of tuition was relatively affordable and, combined

with aid from the federal government, low-income students had ways of affording higher

education. But national political and social movements changed the nature of support of higher

education. Ohio’s population, like the rest of the nation, was divided over the highly-publicized

Free Speech and Anti-War Movements on some college campuses. Depending on how they

interpreted the events, Ohioans perhaps thought college and university campuses were either

responsible for radicalizing students into draft-dodging protest or institutions that attracted draft-

dodging radicals. Jim Rhodes made his interpretation known when he dispatched the Ohio

National Guard to Kent State in 1970 and four students were senselessly murdered. Political and

economic transformations brought on by the ‘Silent Majority,’ the ‘culture wars,’

deindustrialization, the Reagan Revolution and ‘Supply-Side’ economics influenced

policymakers across the United States during the 1970s and 1980s — including those in the Ohio

General Assembly. By that time, however, the time to invest in public higher education had

already passed.

Analyzing how state institutions are disproportionately influenced by national and

regional events is important because it helps us understand more about how much political and

economic autonomy a state really has. Ohio’s leaders before the mid-1960s often made

decisions about the state’s economy before looking at national or regional economic forecasts.

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What they didn’t realize is that the growth of the industrial Sun Belt, tech-based Silicon Valley,

and global markets would have negative effects on Ohio’s economic fortunes. The United

States’ economy is an inter-connected web of local, state and regional markets that rely on each

other for sustained prosperity. Moreover, the national economy is in a continuous state of

evolution and no industry is safe from becoming irrelevant. Ohio’s manufacturers were a part of

the United States’ manufacturing industry, and once manufacturing began crumbing nationally, it

was only a matter of time before Ohioans were effected.

Another reason to analyze how state institutions are disproportionately influenced by

national and regional events is to see how, or if, public higher education actually influences

economic prosperity. After all, regardless of whether state leaders want public higher education

to be accessible or elite, the intended outcome of each purpose is fairly similar — economic self-

sufficiency — and this outcome is beneficial to the state because of increased economic

prosperity. An individual can get a college education because public higher education is

accessible. From that education, the individual gets a good paying job and, hopefully, achieves

economic self-sufficiency. If a state purposes public higher education for research and elite

academic achievement, the goal, at least in the case of Ohio, is also economic prosperity.

Developments in the state’s research capabilities lure new industries to the state, then those

industries provide good paying jobs, and an individual achieves economic self-sufficiency. In

both cases the state wins. It has a reliable tax base, less unemployment, a higher GDP and a

higher per-capita income. That, at least to this author, seems like economic prosperity.

In contemporary America, public colleges and universities have become their own

industry by providing knowledge and research to companies, the federal government and health

care providers — a development that piloted numerous instances of economic transformation

over the last sixty years. Public colleges and universities also credential a significant portion of

the American workforce. A dominant theme in the recent past of Ohio public higher education is

that the system’s purpose was ever-changing despite the Regents’ attempt to uphold a consistent

Master Plan.

Overall, one of the biggest takeaways of this dissertation is that Ohio’s public colleges

and universities were not able to keep up with the pace of change in American higher education.

The United States does not have a national university, nor is there one governing body

completely in charge of policymaking for every college and university. American higher

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education is mostly a term used to describe a loose collection of roughly 4,000 institutions that

are free to govern themselves. While federal policies and oversight do exist, and every state has

similar higher education laws and policies, the bulk of an institution’s success stems from the

strength of their endowment, prestige of its’ faculty research and the visionary leadership of its’

administrators. Ohio simply did not keep up with changes sweeping across the landscape of

American higher education and the state’s economy.

The other factor that accounts for Ohio public higher education’s changing purpose is

directly tied to the political nature of democratic governance. Elected political leaders are our

policymakers. They view the world through an ideological lens or political party platform that,

for the most part, offers particular solutions to economic, social and cultural problems.1 But

political ideology changes over time: Republicans and Democrats of fifty years ago are not

likely to see the world exactly the same as the Republicans and Democrats of 2020.2 Even the

meaning of Conservatism changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century.3 As

legislative agendas and priorities changed as Republicans and Democrats competed over the

General Assembly and Governor’s Residence, long-term legislative victories and consistent

policy implementation over higher education was undercut.

An unintended consequence of not adhering to a long-term policy on public higher

education was the state’s unorganized two-year college system. Access to public higher

education, as defined by the Regents in 1966, was influenced by geographic distance and cost

and the Regents addressed this need by setting a goal of opening a campus within driving

distance of every Ohioan. By 1993, Ohio had thirty-eight state supported colleges and

universities scattered across the state, which is quite remarkable when one considers that the

state only had nine state-supported institutions in 1963.4 Nonetheless, state leaders failed to

1 Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, The Transformation in American

Politics: Implications for Federalism (Washington, D.C.: United States Advisory Commission

on Intergovernmental Relations, 1986), 81-91.

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1450/.

2 See, for example, John H. Aldrich, Why Parties: The Origins and Transformation of Political

Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995); and Stephen E. Frantzich, Political

Parties in the Technological Age (New York: Longman Press, 1989.

3 Kim Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," The Journal of American History 98,

no. 3 (2011): 732-740.

4 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Public Higher Education Basic Data Series: 1993,” Southwest

Ohio Regional Depository, 1.

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control the price of tuition, and the differences in price created a hierarchy in status and the level

of support for different types of institutions. Consider being a resident of Defiance County,

located in Northwest Ohio, and wanting to attend a four-year institution as a commuter. There

are no state-supported institutions in the county. In fact, there are no state-supported institutions

in the four counties bordering Defiance County. The closest state supported institution,

Northwest Technical College, is two counties away. The nearest four-year state-supported

institution, Bowling Green State University, is forty-five miles away. Defiance County was not

an outlier. Other counties, including Logan, Coshocton, Noble, and Mercer, had residents who

were at least forty miles away from the closest four-year state-supported institution.

What’s most frustrating about Ohio’s new arrangement is that state leaders should have

never let higher education get into such a position. Granted, the state was in an economic crisis

for nearly a decade, yet that doesn’t excuse the legacy of partisan politics in both the Governor’s

Office and General Assembly that ultimately kicked the problem down the road. Even the

Regents called out the state for a lack of care when, in their 1992 report on the future of higher

education in Ohio, wrote that Ohio “has been losing economic ground for a generation, in part

because of the low priority the state and many of its people have given education.”5 By 1990

state policymakers had to do something so more people would have access to, and eventually

attend, public higher education because nearly twenty-percent of Ohioans didn’t have an

education beyond a high school diploma, the state had one of the largest income gaps in the

nation between those who had a four-year degree and those who did not, the state’s average

income was one of the lowest, tuition at all institutions of higher education were nearly fifty

percent higher than the national average, and Ohio companies were unable to compete in the new

global marketplace because they lacked the necessary skilled workforce.6 These numbers

shouldn’t be surprising, though. If the recent history of Ohio higher education tells us anything,

it’s that the state didn’t end up this way overnight, but it leaves those who read the story

wondering, “Did anything really change?”

Ohio public higher education still remained dual-purposed throughout the 1990s and into

the new century, but the cost-controlling measures of the Voinovich Administration could not

5 The Ohio Board of Regents, “Securing the Future of Higher Education in Ohio,” Southwest

Ohio Regional Depository, 1992, 1.

6 The Ohio Board of Regents, “Securing the Future of Higher Education in Ohio,” 1-4.

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keep up with the rapidly inflating price of tuition at public institutions. Even with tuition caps

set by the Governor, institutions found other ways to cover the funding gap left by the state’s

budget cuts to higher education. The state would not allocate more money to higher education

and the quest to repair public education only gained popularity as the year 2000 approached.

What this brief, yet significant, saga in the story of Ohio public higher education

illustrates is that no purpose or goal for public higher education, regardless of how noble, can be

achieved without funding. Individual institutions have little incentive to guide their college or

university towards a goal that will cost them a considerable amount of money, even if they will

be financially rewarded by the state, because the risk is just too high. All it takes is one year of

not meeting projected enrollments and an institution becomes financially at risk. Making an

investment in a future program or goal is untenable when annual budgets can be thrown into

chaos so quickly. Tuition is one of the surest ways for colleges and universities to keep a steady

stream of revenue when the state fails to provide assistance. Perhaps that’s where Ohio, and

many other states, have failed the most.

By the 1990s, the Regents recognized that although the state reached its goal of placing a

campus within commuting distance of every Ohioan, it did not remain consistent about what type

of campuses it opened.7 Some counties had a technical college, some had a state community

college, others had a regional campus, a handful had four-year state-supported institutions, and a

select few had one of each. “This kaleidoscope of campuses is confusing to the public,” wrote

the Regents in its 1988 report, “It also has meant until now that the range of services open to a

given community depends upon the particular type of campus that had been placed there a

generation ago.”8 In 1988, the state operated twenty-four two-year branch campuses — as many

as the total number of community and technical colleges combined.9 Tuition at branch

campuses, however, was nearly $1,000 more than community or technical colleges. The Regents

also proposed in 1988 that the state abolish the branch campus system and create one coherent

community college network that would be supported by local property tax and include all the

programs from branch campuses and technical and community colleges.10

7 Ohio Board of Regents, “Securing the Future of Higher Education in Ohio,” 19.

8 Ibid., 19.

9 Ohio Board of Regents, “Ohio Public Higher Education Basic Data Series: 1993,” 2.

10 Ohio Board of Regents, “Securing the Future of Higher Education in Ohio,” 20.

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A similar, albeit unique, fate also befell the Regents’ goal to make Ohio public higher

education competitive in technological research and development for the sake of landing

government contracts. Between the 1960s and 1990s, state leaders did make lasting, influential

changes in the areas of graduate research by authorizing dozens of new Ph.D. and Masters-level

programs at nearly every state-supported four-year institution between 1963 and 1993. As of

2020, the Ohio State University is a nationally recognized institution for its research and study in

fifteen academic disciplines.11 Today, Ohio’s graduate level programs and medical networks

produce valuable knowledge and significant contribute to the local and state economies.

With all of this in mind, does Ohio public higher education have a clear path forward?

Possible answers to this question should be the basis of future work for researchers and

policymakers. First, there has to be a higher level of coordination between the state and leaders

in higher education if Ohioans ever want to fully address the issue of access. Branch campuses,

community colleges, technical colleges and four-year state-assisted colleges and universities

must find a way to streamline the transfer process. Accomplishing this task will require the

Regents to develop guidelines about curriculum standards that all institutions of higher education

follow to determine how courses taken on one campus can easily count towards a program at

another campus. Students should not have to retake courses when they transfer. Forcing them to

do so is not only costing students more money, but it significantly decreases their chances of

graduating on time, or at all.12

Second, the cost of politicizing the topic of funding higher education is causing an

unnecessary financial burden for the American middle- and working-classes and we need to find

new areas of public funding for colleges and universities. Individual states should carry the

responsibility of organizing and develop funding for state-assisted institutions, as well as utilize

11 The Ohio State University, “15 Ohio State graduate programs ranked in top 10 by U.S. News

& World Report,” accessed January 10, 2019. https://news.osu.edu/15-ohio-state-graduate-

programs-ranked-in-top-10-by-us-news--world-report/. 12 Jon Marcus, “Federal study finds nearly 40 percent of transfer students got no credit, The

Hechinger Report, August 20, 2014, accessed January 21, 2019.

https://hechingerreport.org/federal-study-finds-nearly-40-percent-transfer-students-got-credit/ ;

https://nscresearchcenter.org/signaturereport11/; Sean Anthony Simmone, Transferability of

Postsecondary Credit Following Transfer or Coenrollment: Statistical Analysis Report,

Washington D.C.: United States Department of Education: National Center for Education

Statistics, August 2014, accessed January 5th, 2019. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014163.pdf.

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local property taxes, increase income taxes, or make it easier for Ohioans to open and maintain a

529 college-savings plan. The long term economic benefits of educating more Ohioans far

outweighs the cost of managing the price of tuition. Moreover, it is foolish to think anyone, or

the economy, is being served by tens of thousands of Ohioans walking around with crippling

student loan debt. Political leaders should not threaten to cut state-funding for higher education,

nor should they suggest everyone gets free college. There is a middle ground approach and Ohio

is the perfect state to test possible solutions.

Finally, we need more research on community colleges and other two-year institutions,

including how they benefit lower-income and middle-class students and what we can do to

organize them into a single system. Ohio’s present number of two-year institutions far out-

number state-assisted four-year colleges and universities. On a national level, roughly half of all

students attend a two-year campus.13 Yet students at two-year institutions are rarely included in

the surveys of higher education, nor have historians done a good enough job documenting their

experiences — something this study also fails to address. One possible reason behind the lack of

attention given to student experiences at two-year campuses is a lack of primary sources. For

example, while researching Ohio’s community colleges and branch campuses, it became clear to

this author that a good number of institutions did not have student newspapers, yearbooks, or

other student-produced documents. Towards that end, if students did document their experience

at two-year campuses, they did so through private correspondence, such as, diaries, journals,

letters, or conversations — at least that’s what this author found when discussing the topic with

students who attended two-year campuses in the 1980s. Historians of higher education as well as

colleges and universities across the nation need to dedicate more time and resources to

preserving the history of what it was like to attend a two-year institution. The task will not be

easy, but the first generation of two-year college students — those who attended branch

13 Arthur Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence

and Growth of the Contemporary System (2nd ed.) (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 435-

457; Clifford Adelman, Moving into Town — And Moving On: The Community college in Lives

of Traditional-Age Students, Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Education: Office of

Vocational and Adult Education, Feburary 2005, accessed June 2018, xiii.

https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/comcollege/movingintotown.pdf.

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campuses, state-assisted community colleges, and vocational or technical programs when they

first opened in the late-1960s — only have so many more years to share their memories.

Although there is more work to be done, Ohio’s network of state-assisted colleges and

universities have come a long way since the end of World War II. Even though most state-

assisted four-year institutions in Ohio still have a modicum of coordination with one another, the

same is not true for the state’s two-year institutions. Currently, Ohio has a state-level higher

education coordinating board that loosely coordinates locally governed community colleges, but

does not have an independent state-level board for community colleges. Scholars should look

into the benefits of having a state board that is responsible for regulating community colleges —

as found in states like Florida and Pennsylvania — or an independent state board whose sole job

is to coordinate community colleges, which is the case in Kentucky. From there, a new board

could find a new way to fund, consolidate and support all two-year institutions.

These institutions provide valuable services to Ohioans and represent the resiliency of a

state whose fortunes during that time period were less than favorable. While it seems unlikely a

state leader or policymaker will ever flip through the pages of this project, perhaps one might. If

so, my hope is that they understand the need for higher education to be anchored in a purposeful,

clear vision. That higher education does not have one purpose, or two, or even three. The

purpose of a higher education is the purpose given to it by an individual. We’ll never be able to

give everyone exactly what they want out of a college or university experience, but we have a

duty to ensure every person gets an opportunity to achieve what they need at a price they can

afford.

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EPILOGUE

I finished the first draft of my dissertation right as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the

United States. By the time I defend this dissertation to my committee on the last Monday of

May, 2020, Mike DeWine, the Republican Governor of Ohio, announced he would cut public

higher education funding by $110 million over two months.14 Another Republican Governor,

Mike Parsons of Missouri, slashed funding to public higher education by 10 percent.15 Even

individual public institutions, such as Pennsylvania State University, Western Michigan

University, Idaho State University and the University of Arizona, were forced to make budget

cuts in the face of an impending economic recession.16 What’s most fascinating about the

coronavirus-related woes facing American public higher education is that the news wasn’t all

that surprising.

In fact, the news is a nothing more than a continuation of a decades-long trend.

According to the Center on Budgeting and Policy Priorities, state funding for higher education

was $9 billion less in 2017 than it was in 2008.17 During those nine years, eighteen states cut

per-student spending by at least 20 percent.18 Commenting on the way states have few

reservations about taking money away from public colleges and universities, Annette Flores, the

director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, said, “Funding to

public colleges is seen as a little bit more discretionary because institutions have options to fill

budget holes. They could hold back on spending on construction projects, on hiring, they can

14 Paul Fain, “Ohio to Cut Public College Funding by $110 Million Over 2 Months,” Inside

Higher Ed, May 6, 2020. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/05/06/ohio-cut-

public-college-funding-110-million-over-2-months

15 Madison Czopek, “Compromise Eliminates State Higher Ed Cuts, Restores UM Project - with

a Catch,” Columbia Missourian, May 7, 2020.

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/covid19/compromise-eliminates-state-higher-ed-

cuts-restores-um-project-with-a-catch/article_d0e21ad4-90bd-11ea-ace1-d32019fe2f56.html

16 Eastern Michigan University, “Other Universities - Budget Cut Announcements,”

https://www.emich.edu/budget-impact/other-universities-budget-cut-announcements/index.php

17Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, and Kathleen Masterson, A Lost Decade in Higher

Education Funding: State Cuts Have Driven Up Tuition and Reduced Quality, Center on Budget

and Policy Priorities (Washington, D.C., 2017), 4-7.

https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2017_higher_ed_8-22-17_final.pdf, 3.

18 Ibid.

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raise tuition, and so that's one of the reasons why I think higher education in particular is

vulnerable.”19

Flores’ analysis of why lawmakers are more discretionary about cutting spending on

public higher education harkens back to one of the main points brought up in this dissertation:

wrangling and maintaining a steady stream of funding from states for the support of their public

colleges and universities is, at best, like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. For

nearly six decades, the leaders of Ohio higher education fought to get policymakers to fund

higher education. Despite several key victories, the promise of continual, sustained funding

never materialized. Why the budgets of Ohio’s colleges and universities were consistently

slashed, jeopardized or made into a competition for the most funding is a question that can —

and should — still be asked.

The answer to that question, at least to me, is two-fold, and deals squarely with the way

higher education became a political issue and how that directly corresponded with the purpose

higher education serves in a state. As I hope you learned from the case study of Ohio’s system

of public higher education, money was often withheld from public colleges and universities

because the General Assembly or the Governor frowned upon the purpose that the Board of

Regents believed higher education should serve. If higher education became too focused on

educating students at the graduate level, a wave of concern grew about access for students who

wanted vocational or occupational training. If college campuses became too politically dissident,

some politicians would turn that activism against left-leaning students and the liberal culture

from which their views were born. If money became too tight during an economic recession,

higher education often helplessly watched as their budgets shrank.

After decades of being held financially hostage by the state, Ohio’s public colleges and

universities — along with public higher education in nearly every other state — turned to other,

private sources of funding, the sources Flores alluded to in her commentary. Miami University,

where I studied for my Ph.D., is a public university, but a commonly told joke is that the

institution, if it solely relied on funding from the state, would only be able to operate for about

19 Hugh T. Ferguson, “Cuts Expected for State Higher Education Funding in the Wake of

COVID-19,” NASFAA, April 8, 2020. https://www.nasfaa.org/news-

item/21469/Cuts_Expected_for_State_Higher_Education_Funding_in_the_Wake_of_COVID-19

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five hours each week. Do I think the joke is factually correct? Probably not. But the spirit of

the joke — that a state-supported institution of higher education receives a bafflingly small

amount of funding from the state — is quite serious. What we have to recognize is that in the

history of contemporary public higher education (1950s through the present) the question of how

schools will pay their bills has been one of the most pressing issues facing higher education

leaders. We also have to see that the recent history of American higher education is complex and

our vision for the future of America’s colleges and universities must be informed by

understanding those complexities and learning from them. As the old saying goes, if you don’t

know the past you are condemned to repeat it.

My point here is that higher education — particularly at the state level —has a short

memory and our knowledge of that past leaves much to be desired. The pace of physical and

curricular change on campuses across the United States makes it hard for typical Americans to

see that the present financial crisis facing higher education is nothing new. We’ve been here

before; we’ve witnessed budget cuts many, many times. Perhaps that’s why the news of another

budget cut is more of an expectation than a surprise. As state funding decreased, reliance on —

and the price of — tuition increased, the need for private donors to support the school

skyrocketed, and a public institution became uniquely reliant on private funding. That’s why

Governor DeWine’s decision to cut funding to public higher education is just another step in a

long journey of making higher education more inequitable, privately financed and inaccessible to

working-class and lower-middle class Americans.

If we are ever going to stop the madness of letting a public institution like higher

education turn into a private industry, we have to start by addressing what the purpose of higher

education is. I briefly mentioned in the last chapter that the purpose of higher education should

be determined by the student; individuals should be able to attend the college or university that

best fits their vision of an education and have the ability — financial and geographical — to

attend that institution. If an eighteen-year-old wants to receive a liberal arts education, and they

believe the purpose of higher education is to teach them how to analyze problems from the

standpoint of multiple disciplines, then they, as a citizen and consumer, have the right to attend a

school that offers them that opportunity. If a middle-aged barber wishes to change careers and

believes the purpose of higher education is to teach students skills that credential them for a job

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in the service sector, then they, as a citizen and consumer, have the right to attend a school that

offers them that opportunity.

The problem is that the more public higher education has to rely on private means to

survive, the less ability individuals have to afford the college or university of their choice. I am

not suggesting that we offer free tuition to anyone who attends college. What I am suggesting,

however, is that public higher education once again becomes affordable. If the purpose of higher

education is determined by each individual, then institutions of higher education should do

everything they can to focus on affordability as their purpose. Of course, public colleges and

universities can’t do that without state support. As it currently stands, students receive the most

funding to attend higher education from federal grants or student loans. I see nothing wrong

with that. If we left the burden of financially supporting students from low-income families to

the states, we’d have an inconsistent, unequal system of financial aid. That is why state funding

should be primarily focused on the overhead expenses of colleges and universities. The more

individual institutions receive in state funding, the less they have to charge students in tuition,

the less they have to rely on private sources of financing. For its part, the federal government

should allocate funding to individual students in attempt to lessen the financial burden of

attending college. The current system of providing grants and unsubsidized loans is helpful, but

I refuse to believe more can’t be done to ensure students aren’t crippled by debt, or are without

the money they need to attend the college or university that best serves their academic and

economic goals.

Addressing this problem now is important because we’ve seen, especially in the case of

Ohio public higher education, that actions taken in the distant past have contemporary

consequences. Consider where Ohio’s public colleges and universities would be if the state’s

leaders invested in higher education in the 1940s, or even the 1950s. Think about how many

more students may have enrolled in higher education if the state decided to fund a system of

community colleges accessible to every person in each of the state’s eighty-eight counties.

Instead, in the 1960s, Ohio’s Board of Regents, business leaders and policymakers saw the

economic benefit of higher education in scientific research and technological development.

That same thinking still dictates a lot of thinking about the purpose of higher education,

or using higher education as a way to bolster economic development and grow the labor force. I

firmly believe higher education can and should still be a catalyst for economic development and

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gainful employment. What I find most troublesome, though, is the amount of debt students have

to accept in order to attend higher education. How does $75,000 in student loan debt help

national economic development or individuals reach a state of economic independence? We,

citizens who have a say in how our public institutions are run, need to act now to prevent the

actions of today to have lasting consequences that go into the next half-century.

Higher education is a public good — the education we receive benefits the overall health

of our people, our economy, our system of self-government and our ability to effectively

communicate. Allowing that good to slip out of our hands and become even more reliant on

private funding is a mistake we don’t have to make. I encourage you to think critically about

where American public higher education is headed. If this dissertation leaves you with anything,

I hope it is this: don’t assume higher education will change for the better if we just give it a little

time. Ohio has had roughly seventy years to fund higher education and as of a week ago, the

present looks no different than the past.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelman, Clifford. Moving into Town — And Moving On: The Community College in Lives of

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