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StumbleuponWright State to unveil strategic plan at summit
Saturday, August 23, 2008
FAIRBORN — David R. Hopkins was "shocked" when he returned home to Ohio five years ago to become provost of Wright State University.
Like Chrissie Hynde in the Pretenders' song "My City Was Gone," Hopkins found a dramatically different landscape than the one he recalled.
"When I left 27 years ago, Ohio was on top," said Hopkins, an Elyria native who in February 2007 became Wright State's sixth president.
Manufacturing was driving Ohio's prosperity at that time, Hopkins said. "We didn't make the adjustment, as others did, to a new knowledge economy driven by something else."
The result, as noted by Forbes.com when it recently named Dayton, Youngstown, Canton and Cleveland among America's fastest-dying cities, is fleeing populations, painful waves of unemployment and barely growing economies.
"There's a lot of people in pain around here," Hopkins said. "Higher education is really a way to change this."
Wright State regional summit
Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut in March presented a 10-year strategic plan for higher education to Gov. Ted Strickland and the General Assembly that details strategies for colleges and universities to increase the educational attainment of Ohioans as a way of boosting Ohio's economy.
Fingerhut will present the University System of Ohio's Master Plan on Wednesday, Aug. 27, at a Wright State summit on the region's future. It is an invitation-only event.
The 140-page plan is intended to meet Gov. Strickland's goals of increasing college enrollment by 230,000 by 2017, increasing the graduation rate by 20 percent, keeping more graduates in Ohio, and attracting more degree holders from out of state.
Hopkins will unveil Wright State's own strategic plan at the summit and detail how it aligns with the goals of the region and state.
"We wanted to align with the state plan, but make sure we were doing the right things for the region," Hopkins said.
Ohio's plan for higher education
The University System of Ohio consists of 13 public universities, one medical college, 24 regional branch campuses and 23 community colleges.
Fingerhut's plan calls for them to make tuition more affordable, improve the quality of their programs, end the competition for students, and make an associate's and bachelor's degree in core fields available to every Ohioan within 30 miles of home.
The plan's goal is to make higher education the principal driver of Ohio's economic growth and prosperity in the 21st century.
"The state of Ohio is under-educated," Hopkins said. "All the numbers you look at, we're well behind the rest of the nation. We rank 40th in the nation ... in the population over the age of 25 that have baccalaureate degrees.
"In a global society, a global knowledge economy where the currency of this economy is talent, you can't compete."
Accountability
The master plan includes 20 "measurements for success" that will allow the state to determine how well the University System of Ohio is implementing the plan over the next 10 years.
Wright State is well positioned to meet these benchmarks, Hopkins said.
Wright State's annual tuition of $7,278 is among the lowest for Ohio public four-year universities. "We've worked very hard to be an affordable institution because 40 percent of our students come from families of incomes of less than $50,000," Hopkins said.
The plan calls for increases in the total degrees awarded to first-generation college students, as well as black and Hispanic students. Hopkins said 45 percent of new students this year are first-generation, and applications are up 20 percent for black students.
Wright State's efforts now shift to degree completion. "In our new strategic plan, we're going to spend a lot of our strategies on how do we make sure these students succeed."
Wright State has succeeded in retaining talent. Many of its 86,000 graduates to date remain in Ohio. More than 47,800 alumni currently live in the Miami Valley, and another 23,400 live elsewhere in Ohio, according to a 2007 study prepared by Appleseed economic development consultants.
Economic development
Wright State's total research and sponsored program awards for 2007 were more than $71 million, according to university figures. "That is an increase of about 150 percent over the last six years," Hopkins said.
The institution is growing research to "help grow the economy as we take innovation to market," he said.
Wright State, which boasts the first civilian aerospace medicine program in the nation, is focusing on aerospace medicine, human effectiveness and engineering. It launched the Wright State Research Institute in 2007.
"We're creating that because we need to get a higher percentage of those research dollars that go through the Air Force Research Lab (at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) staying right here," Hopkins said. Wright State does more than $20 million in research annually with the lab.
Fingerhut's plan calls for universities to establish "Centers of Excellence" that will be drivers of both the regional and state economies, and that will complement the education available at each institution.
"We're really committed, as we go into the future, to align our capabilities with the needs of the region, and to make sure that we're helping to transform the region," Hopkins said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2419 or dlarsen@DaytonDailyNews.com.
