When NetJets, a private aviation company, announced it would keep and expand its operational headquarters here, Richard T. Santulli, chairman and chief executive, didn't give credit to tax breaks or any of the other incentives states and cities typically use to woo or retain corporations.
Instead, he said the critical factor was the state's higher-education system.
Leaders of Ohio's public colleges persuaded the company that they had the breadth and depth of expertise to meet NetJets's needs, including aircraft-maintenance training at Columbus State Community College, logistics specialists at Wright State University, and a top-ranked culinary program at the University of Cincinnati — an appealing resource for a company that serves gourmet meals at 30,000 feet. And one of the world's foremost experts on seat comfort is on the faculty at Ohio State University.
So in March, after months of considering suitors like Raleigh, N.C., and Fort Worth, Tex., the private-jet service announced that it would create 800 new jobs and invest in a $200-million expansion at the international airport here.
"NetJets' future rests with the talent we are able to cultivate and the research we are able to complete," Mr. Santulli said in a written statement.
Ohio's success in keeping NetJets is part of an aggressive, coordinated, and highly ambitious campaign to transform the state's higher-education system into a driver of economic growth.
As audacious as it is in scope, many here agree that its success so far can be largely credited to two men: Eric D. Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, who devised the plan, and Gov. Ted Strickland, who appointed him to the post almost two years ago and has been a strong supporter of higher education to the state legislature.
At a time when college leaders across the country are talking about their contributions to state and local economies, Mr. Fingerhut's vision is notably bold and comprehensive. He says that the state's higher-education system needs to be transformed to squarely focus on economic revitalization.
"Can we really claim success as institutions if the state is still in decline?" Mr. Fingerhut asks.
His 10-year strategic plan, unveiled two weeks after the NetJets announcement, calls for each of Ohio's 13 universities to capitalize on their strengths in a way that supports economic development; establishes a "skills bank" to better link course offerings with labor demands; and ties state aid for colleges to progress on 20 "measures of success," such as graduation rates.
Thus far, the plan has been generally well received on campuses, in the Capitol, and in company boardrooms.
But even Mr. Fingerhut's staunchest supporters acknowledge the real test is yet to come, particularly as Ohio, like most states, faces a bleak budgetary future.
"It can be a lot harder to sustain a reform agenda than to start it in the first place," says Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit consulting group that advises states and public-college systems.
A Beleaguered Economy
The presidential campaign has brought Ohio's economic woes into the national spotlight. The state shed 236,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chrysler and General Motors, among others, have said they will soon shutter facilities here.
Many of those displaced will need training to gain new skills. Just 33 percent of adults ages 25 to 64 have an associate's degree or higher, compared with 37 percent nationally. While the state outpaces the national average in granting bachelor's degrees, more than a quarter of college graduates leave the state within six months.
Mr. Strickland, a Democrat elected in 2006, campaigned on a pledge to right the beleaguered economy. The son of a steelworker and the eighth of nine children, he was the first in his family to go to college.
"I don't need to be convinced," he says, "of the unbreakable link between educational and economic growth and prosperity."
Ohio isn't alone in its efforts. Arizona, California, North Carolina, and North Dakota, to varying degrees, have tried to make higher education more responsive to their state's economic needs.
"At a time when globalization is changing the world and when we're challenged by a recession, or maybe even a depression, universities need to bring their big brains to the table," says Leslie Boney, associate vice president for economic-development research, policy, and planning at the University of North Carolina system.
What sets Ohio apart, though, is the way in which the governor and his higher-education chief plan to involve every institution in the process, not just the more obvious ones, such as community colleges and their work-force development programs, or research institutions and their potential to fuel new industries.
The Power of Persuasion
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Strickland, a former member of the U.S. Congress and a onetime assistant professor of psychology at Shawnee State University, in Portsmouth, Ohio, invited the presidents of the state's 13 universities and 23 community and technical colleges to a get-to-know-you meeting.
Rather than just stopping in for a quick handshake, Mr. Strickland, whose boyish demeanor and engaging eagerness belie his 67 years, surprised the college leaders by sitting through the entire six-hour meeting, recalls Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.
For the presidents, whose relationship with elected leaders in Columbus had ranged from indifference to outright hostility, the meeting marked a significant shift in tone. The governor was paying attention to them.
He then floated an intriguing proposal. In exchange for freezing tuition rates, among the most expensive in the nation, the governor promised to increase state spending for public colleges, which had been flat for a decade.
Mr. Strickland and the Republican-controlled General Assembly eventually agreed to increase funds for higher education by 3.2 percent over the previous year in the first year of the biennial budget and 8.8 percent in the second.
Equally important, the governor has largely shielded higher education from budget cuts, even as state finances worsened this year. And he helped push through an economic-stimulus measure that set aside $250-million over five years for students to do internships and co-ops with Ohio companies.
These actions proved crucial, academics here say, in helping to establish Mr. Strickland as a man of his word and a genuine advocate for higher education.
Lawmakers also gave Mr. Strickland the authority, which had previously rested with the Board of Regents, to select the chancellor. His choice for the cabinet-level position: Mr. Fingerhut, a former congressman and state legislator who had briefly challenged him in the Democratic primary for governor. (The regents preempted Mr. Strickland by approving Mr. Fingerhut before final legislation passed.)
Mr. Fingerhut, whose evident energy for the job is augmented by Starbucks lattes, has proved an adept salesman. He spent much of his first year on the job traveling the state, logging 34,815 miles on his state car.
Since the higher-education master plan was made public, in April, he has driven thousands more miles to campuses across Ohio, campaigning, like the candidate he once was, for his proposal. Every event, no matter how ceremonial, is one more opportunity to lobby for the plan.
"It is fun to compete on the football field," he tells a crowd at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new campus building at the joint campus of Central Ohio Technical College and Ohio State University at Newark. "But we can't afford to compete where it really matters — to innovate and to strengthen talent."
Cooperation hasn't always come easily to Ohio's public colleges. Not only have Ohio's colleges had a hostile relationship with the state legislature, they have also been fractious with each other. Rather than seeing themselves as part of a system, the campuses have tended to operate as fiefdoms, each with its own board of trustees, lobbying legislators for their separate, and sometimes duplicative, programs.
Yet for this plan to succeed, the campuses will need to work together to meet systemwide goals for increasing graduation rates, enrolling more nontraditional and minority students, finding budgetary efficiencies, and attracting industry-sponsored research.
Mr. Strickland and Mr. Fingerhut seem to have instinctively understood that a key part of their job has been to get the colleges to see themselves as crucial to the health of the overall higher-education system and to the state.
The institutions also are being asked to articulate by next June distinctive missions and to identify "centers of excellence" on their campuses that reflect their core strengths and can contribute to the local and state economies. In many cases, Mr. Fingerhut acknowledges, the centers will be merely a formal recognition of first-rate work already being carried out on some campuses.
The University of Akron, whose main campus is located in the former tire capital of the world, is likely to designate as a center its continuing work with polymers, which are used in rubber and a variety of other products, Mr. Proenza, its president, says.
Wright State University, whose Dayton campus sits on land carved from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, may highlight aerospace medicine.
Indeed, Wright State could offer a glimpse of the Ohio university of the future. The 40-year-old institution has a history of community engagement, says David R. Hopkins, president.
"We know talent and innovation drive the economy — and that's what we do," he says.
In its first year, the Wright State Research Institute did $1.6-million in research sponsored by firms and government agencies and signed 26 contracts. And the university's Homeland Emergency Learning and Preparedness Center is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory and others to build Calamityville, a disaster-training site and tactical laboratory for first responders, medical personnel, and the military. Visitors could bring in $200-million or more over five years.
Wright State is also looking for ways to modify its existing curriculum to offer certificates, short-term courses, or specialized degrees to people already in the work force. For example, it has adapted parts of its course work in logistics and supply-chain management to serve the needs of the Air Force.
Dealing with Anxieties
Although they recognize the need to prove higher education's worth to the taxpayer, some faculty members across the state have expressed concern that the liberal arts could end up taking a back seat to programs that more directly promote economic development.
At Ohio University, faculty members worried that the strategic plan, as written, would not value "knowledge for knowledge's sake," says Sergio López-Permouth, chairman of the faculty senate.
"Universities should not be expected to bear the responsibility to create jobs," he says. "That is not the job of academics but of politicians."
Mr. Fingerhut spoke to those concerns, as well as to anxieties that programs not designated as centers could be cut back or eliminated, at a marathon faculty meeting earlier this year.
Mr. López says the chancellor's assurances left many professors feeling "that this is a good idea, that it's not an evil conspiracy."
Mr. Fingerhut, who previously worked as director of economic-development education and entrepreneurship at Baldwin-Wallace College, a private liberal-arts institution outside Cleveland, says he believes the liberal arts and humanities can spur economic growth as well. In fact, the first center formally submitted to the chancellor by Bowling Green State University focuses on its strong programs in theater, dance, music, film, and digital arts.
Milton D. Hakel, a professor of psychology who leads the university committee vetting the proposed centers, says a recent study that quantified the economic impact of arts-related jobs in Northeast Ohio helped convince panelists that it "fit hand in glove" with the strategic plan.
Measuring Impact
In addition to the debate over what fields contribute to economic development, faculty members and administrators are also wrestling with how to measure their effect.
It turns out system officials are trying to figure this out as well.
NetJets, for one, has volunteered its expertise in data analysis and operations research to help craft more-specific and appropriate metrics for the master plan.
System officials also are collaborating with the Business Alliance for Higher Education and the Economy, a group of executives, to draft an employer-satisfaction and business-needs survey. A third measure, the newly created Ohio Skills Bank, draws on federal and regional economic data to determine labor-force supply and demand and guide community-college officials in modifying or creating certificate or degree programs.
The challenge of measuring community and economic impact is a national one, says Dan Berglund, president and chief executive of SSTI, a national nonprofit group that tracks scienceand technology-based growth.
Also, policy makers and business leaders often do not clearly say what they expect from colleges. "There are some pockets of conversation" across the country, he says, but academe and industry often "need a translator."
As is true in many states, colleges here aren't generally seen as open or responsive to business needs.
While there are many examples of good working relationships — Ohio State, for example, ranks second among all universities nationally in the amount of private-sector research it conducts — business leaders say the system over all needs to try harder.
In many cases, employers wanted to work with colleges but "didn't know which door to knock on," says Richard D. Rosen, vice president of education and philanthropy at Battelle, a Columbus-based research and development company.
They also were often frustrated by university bureaucracy and slow response, says Thomas Waltermire, chief executive of Team Northeast Ohio, a private-sector economic-development group. Some remain skeptical about whether colleges have changed, he says.
Other business leaders say they are heartened by how hard Ohio's colleges worked to keep NetJets. At one point during the negotiations, Mr. Fingerhut assembled every engineering-school dean in the state, including those from private colleges, to talk to company officials about their research and programs.
Daniel H. Rosenthal, executive vice president of the office of the chairman at NetJets, says he tells other businessmen about the experience.
"The meeting sounds so trivial," he says, "but it conveyed such an important message to us."
An Attitudinal Earthquake
Despite their initial success with the legislature, academia, and the business community, Mr. Strickland and Mr. Fingerhut still have a lot of work ahead. And some observers worry that without these two powerful personalities, the plan could founder.
Mr. Jones, the education consultant, says such reforms can be hard to sustain after a change in leadership. In Kentucky, he notes, momentum to increase college-going rates faltered somewhat after the effort's architect, Gov. Paul E. Patton, left office.
Another, more immediate challenge, is a proposed change in the way higher education in the state is financed. The plan calls for state aid to be tied to institutions' success in meeting the strategic goals, a departure from the current enrollment-based formula.
How the new formula is crafted could be key to retaining the support of both lawmakers and college leaders. "We want to fund higher education based on quality," says State Rep. Jay Hottinger, a Republican who is chairman of the House finance and appropriations committee.
Then there is the state's fiscal outlook. Mr. Strickland says he wants to "keep faith" with public colleges in the state, but given the economic crisis facing Ohio, and the rest of the nation, he has stopped short of committing to a tuition freeze or to budget increases.
Ohio's success in reforming its higher-education system, though, may ultimately come down to political and public will. Does the state really want to make such a radical change to the way it views higher education?
Roderick G.W. Chu, Mr. Fingerhut's predecessor, who also focused attention on work-force development, says he's not sure. But others think opinions have changed.
E. Gordon Gee, who returned to lead Ohio State last year, spent the summer touring each one of the state's 88 counties and says he was struck by the change in mind-set.
"They used to think they could muscle their way through the old economy," says Mr. Gee, who also was president from 1990 to 1997. "Now, they know they have to invest in the future economy. Attitudinally, there's been an earthquake in this state."
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Volume 55, Issue 12, Page A15
