Students plan rally for support to restore career-college funds

By Harold Gwin

Students are concerned that the new state budget will cut the grant funding in half.

LIBERTY — Students at the National College campus, 3487 Belmont Ave., will stage a rally at 11 a.m. Saturday seeking support for an effort to restore full Ohio College Opportunity Grant funding to the governor’s biennial budget.

That’s the only state funding assistance available to students attending career colleges such as National College, and the governor’s proposed budget would cut the program by more than half.

There are nearly 300 career colleges and schools operating in Ohio.

OCOG funding for this fiscal year, which ends June 30, is expected to total $61 million. The new budget would also direct that the grants, which can be as much as $3,996 based on family income, no longer go directly to students but to the institutions in which they are enrolled.

Career colleges worry that the suggested block-grant arrangement sets them up for a line-item slash by the governor that could cut all OCOG assistance.

It’s a battle very similar to one successfully fought by career colleges and their students in Ohio two years ago when the state also considered slashing OCOG funding, according to the Ohio Association of Career Colleges and Schools.

“We want our voice to be heard,” said Paul McCartney of McDonald, a third-term student at National College seeking an information systems engineering associate degree.

The OCOG assistance is the only state-funded grant available to career college students, he said, noting the average grant is $2,250 a year. More than 22,500 students are receiving the grant.

McCartney said the local rally will be staged in the National College campus parking lot, and area legislators, local elected officials and students who will be directly affected by the loss of funds have been invited.

For many of that latter group, the OCOG grant is the difference between being able to afford to go to school or not, McCartney said, estimating that 15 percent of the 37,000 students now enrolled in career colleges seeking associate degrees would have to drop out of school.

That’s not in Ohio’s best interest, he said, noting that statistics show that career-college students graduate at a rate of 2.5 times that of students in traditional community colleges.

Students and the OACCS have designed and are managing a Web site at www.savocog.org to help support a grass-roots movement to get full funding restored in the proposed budget.

gwin@vindy.com