Ohio House budget requires private colleges comply with diversity ban to be eligible for scholarship
The Ohio House's version of the two-year state operating budget added new requirements for private colleges if they want to continue to participate in the Governor's Merit Scholarship, including complying with Ohio's new higher education ban on diversity and inclusion efforts.
According to language from the House's version of the budget, private colleges must automatically accept the top 10% of all high school graduates and comply with parts of Senate Bill 1 — Ohio's massive new higher education law that is set to take effect in June and only applies to public universities and community colleges.
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C. Todd Jones, president and general counsel of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio (AICUO), questioned the motive behind the bill.
'It's clearly intended to have a bigger effect and push students to public colleges or out-of-state,' he said. 'Our state needs a better workforce and there is simply no way that the public colleges alone have the capacity with the ability to attract all of the students who want to seek those degrees,' he said.
The Governor's Merit Scholarship gives the top 5% of each high school graduating class a $5,000 scholarship each year to go to an Ohio college or university. It was enacted through the last state budget two years ago and 76% of the state's 6,250 eligible students from the class of 2024 accepted the scholarship.
About 20% of the students who received the Governor's Merit Scholarship attend a private Ohio college, Jones said.
The Ohio House kept the funds for the Governor's Merit Scholarship the same in the budget as Gov. Mike DeWine's original proposal — $47 million for fiscal year 2026 and $70 million for fiscal year 2027, according to the House's version of the budget.
The House passed the budget Wednesday with a 60-39 vote and it now moves to the Ohio Senate. DeWine must sign the budget by June 30.
Automatically absorbing the top 10% would be tough for private colleges since they don't have branch campuses like most public universities in Ohio, Jones said.
'Many of our colleges lack the ability to take this kind of a surge in a given year,' he said. 'They don't even have the capacity to have larger classes. They simply are physically unable to do this.'
The requirements for the Governor's Merit Scholarship in the House's version of the budget includes some of Senate Bill 1's many provisions for private colleges including banning diversity efforts, creating post-tenure reviews, and requiring students to take an American history course, among other things.
But some private colleges don't have any tenured faculty or may only have a handful of tenured faculty, Jones said.
'It is really about creating such burdens on private colleges, on nonprofit private colleges, that there would be no interest left in participating in the (Governor's Merit Scholarship),' Jones said. 'Why does Ohio — a state that has a desperate workforce need, that has a population problem where people are not moving here and our young people are moving away — why in the world are we quibbling for a few $1,000 to students that can get to stay here and provide for our workforce that leads to jobs?'
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