Football Factory?

Discussion in 'Sports Board' started by Stu Ryckman, Nov 24, 2006.

  1. Stu Ryckman

    Stu Ryckman Well-Known Member

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    This isn't really sports related, so I won't protest if you kick it out to the Back Room, but I wanted to post it here.

    We frequently get academic comparisons posted here, and it gets discouraging to always be seemed considered only a football factory.

    I have always maintained that every school has a different "mission" and it's not always that cut and dried in trying to maintain a certain admissions level, graduation rate, or whatever.

    Ohio State decided a few years ago to drop the "let any HS graduate from Ohio in" policy and be more of a flagship university. But they just received kudos for trying to maintain minority and low-income access at the same time.

    Boarding the Flagship University

    Boarding the flagship university
    Friday, November 24, 2006
    Just because Ohio State University has be come more selective in admissions doesn't mean minority and low-income applicants should be shut out.

    Indeed, the university is so committed to maintaining access to all qualified students that it has won national recognition in a new report.

    The Education Trust, a nonprofit research organization, blasts most states' flagship universities in its analysis, dubbing them "engines of inequality." Specifically, the organization finds that lower-income students are far less well-represented at public flagship institutions than in higher education in general, and for minority students, the disparity is even wider.

    "The flagship institutions, as a group, don't even come close to adequately representing the populations of their state," the authors write.

    The report grades all flagship campuses using criteria that include actual access, progress in access over time and graduation rates. No school earned an A, and just four - the University of Hawaii, the University of New Hampshire, the University of New Mexico and the University of Vermont - earned B's. OSU was among those earning C's, but its recent efforts so impressed the authors that they included a separate article about the school's progress.

    OSU placed former financial aid director Tally Hart in a new position, senior adviser for economic access, and told her to recruit more disadvantaged students and find better ways to help them stay in school. This addition, as well as a range of other initiatives targeted at helping all freshmen, helped drive up OSU's overall graduation rate and more than doubled the four-year graduation rate for black males.

    These initiatives, and their early success, send a signal statewide that OSU understands its obligation to serve all capable Ohio students.

    Thanks to reports like this one, it also offers a model for flagship universities across the country. (The full document can be found at www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/).
     
  2. Terry O'Keefe

    Terry O'Keefe Well-Known Member Administrator

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    Congrats, I would certainly agree that Universities across the country have a very different mission, it really isn't fair to compare ND/Duke/Northwestern/Stanford/Ivies to the typical state u. Very different missions.