Ohio has a long standing commitment to provide a high‐quality, affordable, and accessible education at public colleges. But the Governor is proposing that Ohio abandon this commitment in favor of converting our public educational institutions to “charter universities”, or “entrepreneurial universities” as they are now cleverly being called. But don’t be fooled. This idea undermines the concept of public universities by making them for-profit driven. 

Charter or entrepreneurial universities would blow the cap off tuition making access to a college education more difficult and unaffordable for most Ohio families. Virginia implemented this concept and Virginia Commonwealth University had a 24 percent tuition increase this past year alone. That means students in Ohio would be forced to choose between attending college at all, or doing so but graduating with an excessive amount of debt. This would also prevent adult Ohioans from returning to college to learn new skills for jobs in new industries, resulting in less trained workers and less economic activity in our communities.

Tell Gov. Kasich that Ohio should not shift focus on the classroom, access, and affordability of higher education by converting our public institutions into capital development mechanisms that cause tuition to skyrocket, makes universities exempt from public records laws and construction regulations, and creates a lack of accountability on how taxpayer dollars are spent.