A Policy of Accessibility: Ohio Public Higher Education’s Attempt at Equity, 1975–1983

Abstract

A Policy of AccessibilityOhio Public Higher Education’s Attempt at Equity, 1975–1983 Jonathan Tyler Baker (bio) 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 10 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 with other states at the highest academic levels 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 Republican governor of Ohio Jim Rhodes’s decreasing support of 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 requiring 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. [End Page 112] 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 public campuses. Even though Ohio had more students enrolling in higher education than ever before, roughly 70 percent of the state’s traditional college-aged population was forgoing college altogether. The Regents found that a significant portion of the traditional college-aged population who forewent college were women who were either low-income, black, or 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 socioeconomic problems. American higher education has, in some ways, represented a route toward economic and social mobility, but those routes are only available if state policy-makers 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 counterintuitive 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 article seeks to complicate what historians of higher education believe about the enrollment spikes caused by the...