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(09-18-2020 07:53 AM)CliftonAve Wrote:  

(09-18-2020 07:21 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  

(09-18-2020 06:41 AM)OKIcat Wrote:  

(09-17-2020 11:15 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(09-17-2020 08:09 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  I really think that with some good leadership and vision that UC can pass Miami by academically as an undergraduate school this decade. We've done that with OU, and Miami will be next. Miami's administration is complacent, and sometimes I think they are completely ignorant of the fact that their vaunted "public ivy" glory years (essentially the late 60 to the early 80s) were the result of OSU being forced into open admissions by the Rhodes administration. Before that, they were just considered as one of the "four corner" schools with OU, BG and Kent. Go back further, and the school literally had to shut down for a decade due to no enrollment and money. Public Ivy wasn't the historical norm; it was a historical aberration resulting from the state screwing with the flagship school. Academically, they find themselves in some weird nowhere land. They're not a research school and have no reputation in STEM, but they're also not the "liberal arts college" that they try to advertise themselves as. They're a fairly large (17K) moderately selective public university where everybody majors in business and as noted above their campus is stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Miami's problem is that they only have one cash cow that everyone else mooches off: the business school. Every school has departments that need to be subsidized (typically the liberal arts departments that provide gen ed courses). At Miami they all have to get subsidized from the same place, so the only cash cow gets starved of the cash it needs to grow the institution.

At UC, there's multiple cash cows: medicine, DAAP, CCM, engineering, and (somewhat) nursing and business. The subsidy gets spread out, so it's a manageable burden for each of those units to provide to the liberal arts college.

The local R2 schools that are in decent shape have multiple cash cows. Ball State has business, architecture, and education. Illinois State has actuary/insurance, business, nursing, and the best education school in the country. Ohio U has business, nursing, and used to have journalism. IUPUI has a massive medicine cash cow, plus small profit centers in engineering and business. Toledo has medicine, business, and engineering.

Miami is still in decent shape because it had a big head start on those schools 30 years ago. But they are losing their advantage, and UC is not the only institution that is benefiting at Miami's expense.

Bolded, great observation and detailed support of your argument. I will only add that in Miami's "glory days" of the 60's and 70's there were far more social science and liberal arts majors than today. As you pointed out, when those students shifted to anything except business (engineering especially) Miami's offerings were very limited compared with UC.

OSU was crowing sometime in the last year that for Ohio kids who are accepted to both OSU and Miami and end up at one of the two schools, 9 out of 10 end up at OSU. If something about the post-COVID world dries up that Chicagoland pipeline, Miami could be in real trouble on many different fronts--enrollment, finances, selectivity and rankings. And it really is just Chicagoland. Miami has never come close to replicating that student demand (and they've spent years and a ton of money trying) in the Northeast, South or West Coast.

If things change in Illinois then Dayton will be in even worse shape. I think they take more kids from that state than Miami does.

Speaking of post Covid, I noticed UC has bulked up on a few more online programs which is definitely the way to go.

But both Miami & Dayton have broad appeal outside Chicago. Miami got 335 freshman enrolled from Illinois in 2018, and Dayton had 374. That's a lot, but it's about the same as Butler (a much smaller school), Kentucky, or Alabama. Western Michigan (530) & Marquette (913) are far more dependent on Chicago kids. So are Iowa & Iowa State, which both have over 1,000.