The Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc. was established in 1996 as a focal point for ongoing collaboration between our five institutions. Together we work on issues and opportunities of mutual concern, creating joint programs that enhance our member institutions.
This foundation of trust stimulates us to challenge the status quo and imagine how we might be better off both collectively and individually. We are also a forum for our presidents, who form our Board of Directors, to initiate public dialogue about consortial innovations, current issues affecting higher education, and the value of a liberal arts education.
Current Strategies
Our colleges collaborate on services and contracts to save money using a common e-procurement system that also allows us to track spending across the consortium. In its initial implementation in 2013, this system saved our institutions over $500,000 and continues to yield savings benefits as more contracts are added. We also regularly join forces for major expenditures that eliminate the need for duplicate purchases on individual campuses.
Current goals include:
- Improve the efficiency and cost of our five colleges financial operations through systems collaboration
- Reduce vendor costs and improve services through collaborative purchasing and resource sharing
The Ohio Five provides opportunities for our colleges to collaborate on new academic projects or pilot new ventures for individual campus or consortial implementation. Beginning with our longstanding collaboration in library systems and programs, our colleges' joint programs have included a post-doctoral fellows program in languages, support for faculty members conducting digital scholarship projects, and a curricular coherence initiative to assist students in planning their academic programs.
Current goals include:
- Strengthen and broaden our colleges' curricula and promote our consortium's distinctiveness through distance learning collaborations that combine resources and control costs
- Integrate digital scholarship with our colleges' digital literacy initiatives to expand student and faculty mastery of best practices and approaches in research and learning made possible by digital scholarship
- Support access to and preservation of our libraries' digital resources for scholarship, teaching, and student success
The Five Colleges of Ohio champions the excellence of Ohio's leading liberal arts colleges by promoting programs that enhance the distinctiveness and quality of our students' experience and support resources available to our faculty members. We are currently developing ways to link our colleges to Columbus and Cleveland, our state's two largest cities near our campuses, through joint programs with their leading universities. The Ohio Five is also assisting our faculty in convening discussions about further developing our colleges' teaching and advising practices in response to the increasing diversity of our student bodies.
Current goals include:
- Establish Ohio Five Colleges as national leaders among undergraduate STEM summer research programs by creating a dedicated pathway for our students to applied science and research opportunities within the Ohio corporate, government, and university communities
- Position our colleges to attract an increasingly diverse student body and faculty to Ohio from a national and international rena and develop consortial initiatives to support their success and retention.