There is good and bad news about students who attend Ohio State's branch campuses. The bad news is, OSU regional campus students are graduating at a lower rate than directly admitted OSU students. The good news is, they are still well ahead of transfers from other institutions.
The most recent data from the Office of Enrollment Management shows that while students who begin at the Columbus campus graduate at a rate of 72.7 percent, those who transfer in from a regional campus within their first two years, graduate at a rate of only 63.8 percent.
Gail Stephenoff, the director of the Office of Enrollment Management, says that the disparity should come as no shock.
"It is not surprising that our students that begin at a regional campus have a lower six-year graduation rate. The entering academic profile of students is generally predictive of their success. The average ACT composite score for the 2002 Columbus campus class was 25.2 compared to about 20.4 for students who begin at Lima, Mansfield, Marion or Newark," she said.
In addition, OSU has fewer requirements for students who transfer into the university. Despite increasing admission standards for graduating high school students, transfer students who have earned at least 45 quarter or 30 semester credit hours are considered for admission on a "competitive basis" and need not submit any type of high school transcript, ACT or SAT score.
Rob Keeling, a sophomore in engineering, attended the Mansfield branch for a year before transferring to Columbus. He says the biggest difference between the two campuses is class difficulty.
"A lot more effort is necessary for classes in Columbus than at Mansfield. The classes here are more competitive and since the kids at branches typically weren't the sharpest tools in the shed, I could frequently beat the curve without opening a book," he said.
But Keeling and other branch transfers will still have a better chance at graduating than those coming from other colleges and universities.
The Office of Enrollment Management's data shows that transfers from other institutions will graduate at a rate of 58.5 percent.
Keeling was not surprised by the difference. He says that while he doesn't feel his branch completely prepared him for life in Columbus, there were some positives to attending a branch campus.
"It was a lot more like high school because most of my classes had like 20 to 30 kids in them," he said. "I had chemistry in 'the big lecture hall' and probably only had like 100 people in it. There were no recitations, but since classes were small, the professor-to-student ratio was more in your favor and you could actually not feel overwhelmed asking a question like you would in a huge lecture here."
Richard Oviatt can be reached at oviatt.3@osu.edu.
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