Across the nation, newspaper articles informed readers and television stations aired video footage of the riots on 13th Avenue this fall. As a result, Ohio State might have a harder time selling its image as a great academic institution to potential students and their parents.”There is a sense that we do have an issue with this from time to time,” said Lee Tashjian, OSU spokesman. He said that negative events, like the riots on 13th Avenue, can quickly offset the OSU’s reputation for being a good university.”As a part of how these people think about us, these issues come to mind,” Tashjian said. “One of the things we decided early on is that this kind of thing is happening too frequently.”Negative responses have come up in focus groups that the university has held in high schools across the state. Tashjian said that high school juniors and seniors in the top 25 percent of their class have expressed concern over the riots and in some cases, changed their decision to attend OSU.”This was unaided research. No one tipped them off to talk about this,” he said. “When time goes by it will definitely be less of a topic of conversation.”Jim Mager, associate vice president for Enrollment Services, said the issue of rioting at OSU came up in a recent meeting with high school counselors in Akron. “The question that was raised there was, ‘What would possess a person to flip over cars and set things on fire?'” Mager said. “The problem is alcohol. Certainly, it’s an Ohio State problem but it’s a problem in high schools and other universities.”Mager said most high schools do not know much about the riots at OSU because media coverage of the riots was not as heavy in other parts of Ohio as it was in Central Ohio.”We were surprised we did not hear more about the riots (from parents and students),” he said, “but that does not mean that we aren’t taking these riots seriously.”Charlene Wheeler, a guidance counselor at Dayton Chaminade-Julienne High School, said that neither she nor the other guidance counselors have heard any mention of the riots from students or parents.”They have not had much concern,” Wheeler said. “What I hear from students is concern over the size of Ohio State.”Dayton’s Chaminade-Julienne sends around 20 to 25 graduates out of an average class size of 200 students to OSU every year.”The kids that go there seem to be happy and have found their niche,” she said. “We are still sending applications up there.”Tashjian said the communication between the university, students and families of students has been a positive result of the riots.”This is the first time I’ve seen such dialogue going on,” he said. Referring to a letter OSU president William “Brit” Kirwan sent to families of students last week, Tashjian said, “We have received a number of e-mails from parents and students, and not one parent disagreed with what the president said in his letter.”In an e-mail sent to Kirwan, an OSU student wrote, “I applaud the fact that you have elected to take action against the perpetrators of these heinous acts. I agree with your response but ask you to dig deeper than your characterization as strictly related to alcohol abuse and the lack of civility associated with that as the cause.”One student’s father wrote to the president about a conversation he had with his nephew, a member of the Michigan University marching band. He wrote, “We asked if things like this happened in Ann Arbor. He answered, ‘We never have any riots here – our students are very diverse a lot don’t even care about sports, so there’s never a big enough group to really start a riot.’ I believe this is true and that this is far more important a measure of the two universities than whatever the score of the football game was. OSU lost big that day and it wasn’t in the stadium.””Certainly this is a major issue, but it is important to note that 99 percent of the students did not participate in (the riots),” said Mager.He said that the university will know how negatively the riots have affected OSU’s image in the spring, when high school students make their final decisions about which university to attend.