State to create report cards for colleges

Data will be online for public to compare
Sunday, April 6, 2008

By Encarnacion Pyle

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

....Click image to enlarge.

Ohio's primary and secondary schools are used to being graded each year on their students' academic performance. That's not the case for colleges.

That's going to change. This week, Ohio's higher-education chancellor, Eric D. Fingerhut, introduced a 10-year master plan for the state's public colleges that includes 20 benchmarks in four categories: access, quality, affordability/efficiency and economic leadership.

"It's a quantum leap forward from where we are," said Bruce Johnson, president of the Inter-University Council of Ohio, which represents the state's 13 public universities and one free-standing medical school.

The goals are to:

• Make college more available to all Ohioans.

• Continue to improve the quality of the state's schools.

• Lower tuition costs.

• Have higher-education successes help the state's economy.

Each goal has five more goals, including increasing enrollment in state schools to 702,694 students by 2017 from today's 472,694 and making tuition costs for a combined associate and bachelor's degree from a community college or university regional campus among the 10 least-expensive in the country.

"Accountability is the path to change," said Michael Chaney, Fingerhut's spokesman.

The schools also will join a national voluntary accountability system and will provide comparable information on campus safety, degree programs, financial aid, learning outcomes, price, retention and graduation rates, and student satisfaction. The results will be available to prospective students and their families in an online database.

Several states, including Florida, Maryland and Texas, have similar scorecards for their public schools.

All Ohio colleges already are required to provide performance indicators to the Ohio Board of Regents. And many schools track specific measures to prove their value to alumni, prospective students and the state and federal governments.

Ohio State, for example, grades itself on 36 points against nine colleges it aspires to be like, including UCLA, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas. Items include academic honors and awards and faculty and student satisfaction.

"It allows us to get an overall picture of what we need to work on, and to make sure we're not investing too much in one area while starving another," said Julie Carpenter-Hubin, Ohio State's director of institutional research and planning.

For example, Ohio State made efforts to retain minority students after tracking the figures, and it raised the percentage of black men returning for their sophomore year to 91 percent in fall 2006 from 86.5 percent a year earlier.

Ohio University has a similar system, and Columbus State Community College is working on one.

Although details need to be worked out for the statewide report card, many college officials say they support efforts to improve accountability.

"Are these the right goals? I don't know, but they're a good start," said Ronald Abrams, executive director of the Ohio Association of Community Colleges. "We can always refine the benchmarks, but the important thing is to hold ourselves up to a set of high standards."

But college administrators say they are anxious to hear how the state intends to tie funding to the goals.

For example, Ohio State doesn't plan to increase enrollment on its main campus. And community colleges aren't likely to improve graduation rates as quickly as four-year schools.

Ohio's public universities will have 20 benchmarks set by the state and join a national accountability system.

epyle@dispatch.com