COLLEGE EVOLUTION

COLLEGE

EVOLUTION

As Ohio’s institutions of higher education prepare a return to the sort of social experience students had prior to the pandemic, they are also embracing new modes of educating and counseling that have proven valuable during the past two years. BY RUTH CORRADI BEACH

The beginning of the 2022-23 school year at colleges and universities across Ohio will bring with it a return to campus life as we knew it prior to the pandemic. But normal won’t look the same as it did before. Although masks are gone, some of what was added and learned during the pandemic is here to stay — and that is a good thing, as far as opportunities for students goes. If there is any positive to the upheaval experienced since 2020, perhaps it is that schools discovered, by necessity, that there are different ways to do things.

COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

Students at the University of Toledo take part in a campus event — one of the social cornerstones of the college experience.

“When you have to quickly shift to online, ready or not, you learn,” says Tom Perry, vice president for communication and brand management at Marietta College, a private, four-year college in Marietta, Ohio. “We’ve learned what we liked doing and want to get back to. We’re going to keep some of those [new] elements and, at the same time, we’re trying to grow some of those pieces, trying to improve in those areas.”

For Marietta College, a small institution where students typically complete an undergraduate degree via four years of full-time study, the pandemic provided new insight into students who desire to go a different route.

“We’re realizing that there is a market out there for students who want the remote experience, and that realization maybe opens us up to markets we didn’t reach before, students who maybe started at a place like ours and realize that with just a couple more years of online work they could have a degree,” Perry says.

He adds that the school also learned from students who didn’t want to come back to campus right away once in-person instruction restarted. It was a small group of students, he adds, but the college realized it needed to take steps in order not to lose them. Administrators also began to consider how they could create more offerings to draw in students beyond those seeking the traditional in-person, full-time, four-year experience.

“The pandemic got us to ask, ‘Are there online graduate degrees we can offer? What are new things we can do that are online that don't require someone to be here?’ Maybe in the form of badges or credentials, four- or six-week courses online. The pandemic opened our eyes to the fact that we can do it.”

The flexibility that colleges across Ohio have been embracing gives students options, particularly when it comes to balancing their education with work in an era of historically low unemployment and tapping into online access to student services such as counseling and advising. But alongside this, colleges are also looking to reacquaint their students with the social traditions that have long been at the core of the on-campus experience. This fall, institutions across the state will be looking to balance both. C ommunity colleges such as Cuyahoga Community College in northeast Ohio have long served students seeking flexibility in their higher-education journey, but the pandemic has led Tri-C to focus on being even more versatile than before.

“Our traditional views on what’s normal is nothing like our new normal,” explains Karen Miller, provost at Cuyahoga Community College. “The way [community colleges] thought about delivering education: traditionally fully online or on the ground, traditionally 12 credits per semester … Expectations are different in terms of what students want.”

This is true in part because students, as well as the institutions they attend, have seen what’s possible and are now reluctant to go back. This is especially true with online offerings.

Tri-C, like many other community colleges, has also long provided coursework delivered to suit nontraditional schedules, but Miller says increased demand has in turn increased Tri-C’s focus on offering them.

“We have opportunities for these groups and courses,” Miller says, “but

traditionally we hadn’t put an emphasis on marketing them as a priority to students because it wasn’t what they were looking for. We always had options for evening or weekend courses for working students, and we have a fully online associate degree. [Enrollment in that] is growing more than it ever has.”

Miller notes that students in the workforce now have more job options than they did before the pandemic, and this changing employment landscape has required higher education to adapt.

“We’re competing with higher wages, lots of job options, so we don’t have the expectation that things are going to be back to normal,” Miller notes.

Instead, she says, Tri-C is collaborating with workplaces to offer students specific skills they can use right away in already-identified jobs.

“Health careers are in great demand, engineering and IT, and with Intel coming to Columbus, we’re already talking with partner institutions in northeast Ohio about creating pathways for students in associate to bachelor’s programs to specifically fit the needs of Intel,” Miller says. “We’ll be talking to a lot of students to create collaborations, and many employers have talked about the need for it.”

New fields have risen in popularity, Miller adds, explaining that more students are seeking to gain entrepreneurial and social media skills that support their desire to launch a business.

Student services — such as counseling, academic advising and career advising — also underwent a massive shift during the pandemic, and faculty and staff at the University of Toledo found that online options were so popular that they will continue.

“A lot of student supplemental services are now offered in a variety of modes,” says Adrienne King, vice president for marketing and communications at the University of Toledo. “If it’s more convenient to meet with a success coach remotely, [the coach is] happy to do that.”

Miller says the pandemic proved not only that there was a desire for such options at Tri-C, but also that faculty and staff could provide them.

“We will continue to maintain hybrid availability across a lot of our student services,” she says. “Whatever works best for the student is how we will provide it.” C oursework flexibility and online offerings are great, but what about the in-person moments that are at the heart of the college experience? The times of isolation brought on by the pandemic and how students reacted positively to their return to campus only reinforced the importance of this social aspect. King says some of the adversities brought on by the pandemic underscored just what the University of Toledo community is all about.

“Our campus infection rates consistently remained below local community rates,” she says. “Our students rallied as a community to keep everyone safe.”

She adds that the adherence to safety protocols allowed students to be more engaged in campus life, which to them became valuable to protect.

“We’ve seen the implications of isolation on mental health,” King says. “We are an in-person institution. There are some courses that were online before, and we see that there are options to serve more communities in online master’s or graduate programs, but online is not who we are really at University of Toledo.”

Marietta College is also focused on getting students back into the campus vibe. Perry notes that because learning was interrupted for high schoolers, too, colleges must focus on the needs of incoming students.

“For the next few years, every student coming in will have come through some sort of COVID experience, no matter what that is,” he points out. “That’s going to be an even bigger adjustment when going to campus life. It can be overwhelming.”

Perry says that means Marietta College will have more conversations with students to gauge their comfort and concerns and continue to dedicate resources to ensuring that transition to campus life and the college workload is a positive one.

“The need for mental-health care has become ever more apparent, more crystal clear to us,” he says, “and that’s not going to be changing anytime soon.”

Perry also points out that even once students are acclimated to the on-campus experience, the fact that the students before them missed out on long-held traditions will have consequences for those who are new to the school.

“We have a lot of traditions, fun activities,” Perry says. “We’ve been mask-optional on campus since about February, and always in-person except that small window in the spring of 2020, but there were still traditional, typical college things we couldn’t do.”

Students were together in dorms and class, but the social parts weren’t there, and traditions need someone to carry them on. One such example at Marietta College is Doo Dah Day, a campuswide party that had taken place the Friday before spring finals week since 1973. Because it wasn’t held in 2020 and was scaled back in 2021, many current Marietta College students have never experienced it.

“It’s organized by students, supported by the college, but now it’s up to us to remind them to keep doing it, to educate them on what it used to be,” Perry says. “The same goes for bringing back other traditions.”

Cuyahoga Community College (opposite page) has expanded hybrid availability of its supplemental services. Students take part in Marietta’s Doo Dah Day tradition (above).