Renovation of an educational facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. Completed plans call for the renovation of a educational facility.

https://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/2024/11/08/pinto-explains-ucs-continued-enrollment-growth.html Editors note: The following story is part of Growth in Higher Education 2024, a collaboration between the Louisville Business First and several of its sister publications. Find more stories here. STORY HIGHLIGHTS University of Cincinnati enrollment increased by 3.4% this year. UC's online enrollment grew by 11% this year. UC partners with schools to improve college access. The University of Cincinnati has continued to smash its own enrollment records year after year, in a time when overall college enrollment is declining. This year, UC welcomed 53,235 students for the fall semester, a 3.4% increase from last year. Concurrently, its two satellite campuses saw an average of 6.25% growth in their student populations, its online student enrollment increased by 11% and the number of transfer students increased by 6%. Nationally, college enrollment has decreased at a rate of about 1.5% each year since 2011. Ohio's higher education institutions aren't exempt from the national trends. In the last 10 years, total enrollment has decreased 11.4%, according to the Ohio Department of Higher Education. The university system of Ohio enrolled a total of 509,714 students in the fall of 2014. This fall, that number dropped to 451,477 students. UC stands as a national outlier, one of the few that continue to see record growth despite the decline in the number of young adults seeking a college education. After being appointed as UC's president in 2017, Neville Pinto did some homework, seeking to truly understand what the university's original purpose was. He discovered UC was founded in 1819 and became a public university in 1870, established as a municipal university for the citizens of the city to attend for free. "Where are we going to be as a country if we don't continue the growth of our talent pool," Pinto said. "Is it sufficient to just have 39% of our population going to college Or do we have to aspire for a higher number" Pinto Neville UCexpand Neville Pinto is president of the University of Cincinnati. Andrew Higley Pinto and his team decided to return the university to its original mission as a public institution, to provide education to citizens of Cincinnati, by uplifting local students. "We've got to start to reach out to populations that otherwise would not go to college ... and build the structures and the programs that create pathways for them to come here," he said. "We cannot have this elitist model ... to have a strong democracy, everyone has to have equal opportunity." UC has built partnerships with K-12 institutions, specifically Cincinnati Public Schools, to reach students that might not see college as an option. These partnerships are built on three pillars: readiness, access and success. The university has implemented more than a dozen programs aligned with those pillars to bring local students the opportunity to seek higher education. For example, UC developed an early IT program, which allows students to take a full year of college-level courses while in high school, gain automatic acceptance into the university upon program success and integrate a 20-month paid cooperative education opportunity with an average pay of $45,000, removing large portions of accessibility and financial barriers to higher education. The early IT program is now in 32 high schools and more than 12 community colleges in Ohio. In 2020, Common App, an online college and university application platform, reported "alarming" trends for first-generation and fee waiver applicants, which saw a 10% decline in applicant volume. Yet, UC reports 10,000 of its students, nearly 19%, are first-generation. However, providing an education goes beyond enrollment. It's also about retention and success once admitted. UC has implemented programs like its Marian Spencer Scholarships, exclusively for CPS students, and its Impact House. "Think of it almost like a fraternity or a sorority where they all live together in one house and they all have similar backgrounds," Pinto said. "Then we provide them with the resources like financial planning, nutrition and we teach them the value of giving back (in the form of) a service requirement." Now, more than 2,000 UC students are CPS graduates, including 510 new freshmen, which is a 19% increase from 2023. Online education access is a key player in UC's enrollment growth. With a footprint of just 473 acres across all campuses, UC is the second-largest university in the state by enrollment but one of the smallest by campus size. Comparatively, the largest by enrollment is Ohio State University, which boasts 1,764 acres. Because UC is limited geographically, it must seek growth in other areas like online education. "UC's focus overall this year has been to be a destination for students who want to complete their degree, especially those working adults who are going back to school after some years away," Jack Miner, UC's vice provost of enrollment management, said in a news release earlier this year. UC's online enrollment hit 9,300 students this year with the average age being 30 years old. Pinto said UC has worked to build up its online offerings, now providing more than 110 degrees at various levels, to meet the needs of adult students who can't relocate to campus. Beyond the four walls of a classroom, UC is also the birthplace of cooperative education, which it started in 1906. Last year, more than 8,300 students participated in a co-op program, each earning an average of $10,700 per semester. Collectively, that translates to $88.8 million earned. "The cost of education is a big challenge for families," Pinto said. "One of the best ways to address that is through work experiences. (Another university) would require a scholarship endowment of $1.6 billion to compete with that." These opportunities help remove financial barriers for students seeking postsecondary education, as well as provide them with competitive opportunities to gain work experience, elevating their employability upon graduation. While UC's enrollment has continued to grow, the quality of its student body has done so simultaneously. Admitted students report higher test scores, higher GPAs and more are electing to live on campus, which was not the status quo a decade ago. Since Pinto's first year as president, UC's graduation rate after six years has risen to 75%, 13 percentage points above the national average. "We have started to become the destination school," he said. "This was a backup school. It's no longer that and we're getting increasing numbers of higher-performing students, seeing their future being built here." Building futures takes more than strong academics. It requires the right environment, and more and more students are choosing to live on campus than ever before. Siddall Hall 11expand Siddall Hall features a prefabricated mega-panel facade subtly distinct from the facade on the adjacent Calhoun Hall, which completed its own renovation project in late 2022. Corrie Schaffeld | CBC UC has put $85 million toward the renovation of Siddall Hall, more than $325 million toward its so-called Block 1 & 2 development and spent $9.5 million on the land for its $125 million Bellevue Gardens project. On the athletics front, UC is building a $134 million indoor practice facility and performance center and completed a $6 million renovation to its Fifth Third Arena. "What you see here today is an urban campus that is relatively unique," Pinto said. "It is embedded in almost the heart of a thriving city." It also has invested heavily in its academic facilities, leaning into its teacher-scholar model, in which it expects its teachers to not only transmit information to the next generation, but also create that information. "(College is) the best investment an individual can make in their lives," Pinto said. For Pinto, it's not about UC being the biggest. He said he doesn't celebrate that his university is thriving while others are struggling on the enrollment front because the overall goal is education. "Work is not complete if we have to turn a single student away who is ready to come to the University of Cincinnati," he said. "I am not chasing a number. It's an ideal. My mission as a public university is to serve the public. ________________ https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2023/09/21/uptown-rentals-university-cincinnati.html The university is supporting a $100 million project at Vine Street and Calhoun Avenue and a $120 million project at Martin Luther King Drive and Eden Avenue that will add a total of 1,650 beds in the coming years. ------------------------------------------------------- Project Description : The University of Cincinnati seeks qualifications for Construction Manager at Risk services for the redevelopment of Bellevue Gardens. Bellevue Gardens is a University-owned apartment-style development consisting of two buildings housing a total of 96 beds located on 200 block of Martin Luther King Drive East just east of Gerard Street and north of Bellevue Avenue. The university is also planning to incorporate the 0.89 acres of land between Gerard Street and Eden Avenue, bounded on the south by the park at the western terminus of Stetson Street. Total Project Cost $125,000,000. Submit all questions regarding this RFQ in writing to Michael Myres at michael.myres@uc.edu. Submit all questions regarding this RFQ in writing to Michael Myres at michael.myres@uc.edu with the project number included in the subject line (no phone calls please). Questions will be answered and posted to Opportunities page on the OFCC website at https://ofcc.ohio.gov on a regular basis until one week before the response deadline. The name of the party submitting a question will not be included on the Q&A document.