On election night in 2016, Donald J. Trump won Montgomery County, Ohio, the first time in 28 years it had backed a Republican for president.
One year later, voters here again set a record, passing a $28-million tax levy for Sinclair Community College with nearly 75 percent of the vote. It was the widest margin for approval of any levy in the college’s 131-year history.
It was a curious contradiction: How could the same group of voters who supported a candidate who skewered higher education and much that it values turn around and vote to spend millions on college?
Few people are single-issue voters, of course, and it’s doubtful that many Daytonians saw the election of Trump as a referendum on higher education. Still, Dayton’s tale of two elections is in many ways an embodiment of the current moment, when a substantial share of Americans seems to hold irreconcilable views when it comes to college.
On one hand, half of Democrats and three-quarters of Republicans say higher education is “going in the wrong direction,” according to polling by the Pew Research Center. They think college costs too much. They question whether it adequately prepares graduates for work. And some fear the ivory-tower indoctrination of the next generation, of professors pushing ideas like globalism and multiculturalism on impressionable youth.
As another Election Day approaches, national attitudes toward college appear to only be souring. A survey by Gallup, released in October, shows a nine-percentage-point drop in confidence in higher education since 2015. No other institution — not organized religion or journalism or Washington politicians — experienced as large a falloff in public opinion.
Yet ask people about their hometown college, and their tune changes. A survey (yes, another) by New America, a think tank, found that four in five Americans have a positive view of the higher-education institution near them, regardless of demographics. People who don’t have degrees still like their local colleges, and those with degrees like the local colleges more. Women and men, millennials, baby boomers, and retirees, city dwellers and rural residents — all feel favorably. Even the conservative/liberal split isn’t particularly pronounced when it comes to the college down the street.
In Dayton, voters supported a president who has declared his love for “the poorly educated” and questioned the value of community college, whose Education Department threatens to roll back rules that protect student borrowers. They also cheer for University of Dayton basketball, send their kids to Wright State University, and tax themselves to support Sinclair.
How can this be? How can Americans harbor a deep skepticism for the institution of higher education but regard their local college with affinity and affection? How can they embrace Hometown U. while deriding the system?
To Jeannette L. Roman, the recruiter’s words were like a slap in the face. You have a great résumé, he told her. Twenty-eight years in the Air Force as an intelligence analyst. Knowledge of specialized computing languages. Seventy-five people reporting to her.
“This job is probably a step down for you,” she remembers him saying. “But I can’t hire you, because you don’t have a degree.”
Roman wasn’t seriously looking. She figured she had a few more years in the military, at least until her younger daughter graduated from high school. Even though she was only testing the waters, it was galling to hear that she wouldn’t even be considered for a job for which she was overqualified.
“Instead, you’re going to hire some 21-year-old who just graduated?” she thought. “I have more experience than years he’s been alive!”
Roman may not have a degree, but she has no shortage of college credits, 240 of them. After high school, she didn’t really know what she wanted to do. She studied criminal justice, psychology, and computer science at several colleges. When she switched her major, few if any credits would transfer, and she would have to start almost from scratch.
Frustrated, she joined the Air Force at age 25. Her father had been in the Navy, and she felt certain she would get solid training and a job.
Roman has an engaging confidence and a sense of flair; she pairs military fatigues and a no-nonsense chignon with sparkly nail polish. “Herding cats and stepping on throats since Sep 2010,” reads her email signature line, commemorating the date she was promoted to chief, the highest enlisted rank, limited to just 1 percent of Air Force service members. “I’ve done the job, I’ve had the career, I know how smart I am,” she says.
Yet she worries that history could be repeating with her older daughter, Aubrey. She is 25, the same age Roman was when she enlisted, and has had a series of pays-the-bills jobs since college. She’s now a manager at Target. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a career.
Like her mother, Aubrey can’t see a clear path, and she is scared to run up thousands of dollars in debt when she doesn’t know what she wants to do.
Part of the problem, as Roman sees it, is that colleges just throw you in the deep end and let you sink or swim. She wishes someone had sat her down when she was starting out and talked with her about what she enjoyed and how various degrees could lead to professions. “I can’t vote, I can’t drink, and you want me to figure out a career path for the rest of my life?” she says.
Roman is trying to nudge her daughter to go back to school, although not necessarily to pursue a four-year degree. Aubrey has always liked medicine, and Sinclair, for one, has an intensive paramedic program — 16 weeks of classes, after which students sit for certification.
Dayton is something of a paradox. It’s long been a center for innovation, the place that gave us ice-cube trays, the cash register, and, of course, flight. At one point during the last century Dayton filed more patents per capita than anywhere else in the country. It’s still a hub for aerospace and bioscience and robotics. Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where Roman works, is, in the words of one local economic-development official, the “intellectual capital” of the Air Force. But just 17 percent of the city’s working-age adults have bachelor’s degrees, about half the rate of the country as a whole.
Even as Dayton tries to improve its college-attainment rates, some worry that the focus may be cast too narrowly. Yes, Dayton needs more people with bachelor’s degrees, but the demand is acute, too, for people with two-year associate degrees and specialized certifications and short-term credentials — for some sort of postsecondary training.
Those are the people whom Tim O’Meara, president of Gem City Engineering and Manufacturing, is looking for. His 150-person company helps make and support complex mechanical systems. Many of its contracts, with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, are too classified for him to detail.
O’Meara started with the company 41 years ago out of high school, but that’s no longer a route his employees can take. To run the kind of high-tech machinery Gem City uses requires specialized training. It’s well-paying work, and Gem City will even help pay the cost of schooling. Still, he can’t hire enough people.
“We’re at zero unemployment,” O’Meara says. “The workers that are available are not the ones we want.” If Dayton can’t solve that skills gap, he warns, “we’re going to lose our manufacturing edge.”
Michael Dyer, meanwhile, is a partner in a local law firm. Each day he gets résumés from newly minted lawyers. All he can offer them is contracts to work in the personal-injury firm’s call center, so that when potential clients call in, a lawyer can assess their case. “Fifteen dollars an hour,” he says, “which is what Walmart pays or Amazon pays.”
It’s stories like this that have people questioning the value of college. In the Pew survey, two-thirds of those who thought higher education was going in the wrong direction said students were not getting the skills they need in the workplace. On one hand, college is the gatekeeper, a degree the coin of the realm in today’s economy. Yet people worry about what they’re getting, about college’s return on investment. Has the emphasis on earning a degree perversely degraded its value?
When it comes to Roman’s younger daughter, there is no debate about going to college. Now a high-school freshman, Karlie has been attending the Dayton Regional STEM School since she was in sixth grade. “She’s naturally an engineer,” Roman says. “Her brain just works that way.”
Roman praises the school’s hands-on, immersive approach and its focus on putting students on an early path toward college and a career. She has passed up three opportunities to take new jobs because she doesn’t want to move Karlie. She talks about the STEM school so much that a pregnant co-worker asked her how to apply.
By the time Karlie is ready to go to college, Roman plans to be a college graduate herself. She’s spoken with advisers at Park University, a private college that has a center on base, and hopes to start in January. Having amassed 240 credits, she estimates it will take 18 months to, finally, get that degree.
If Roman has something of a jaundiced view of higher education, Phil Plummer is an unlikely champion.
Montgomery County’s sheriff for the past decade, he’s a law-and-order guy, with the solid build of the wrestler he once was.
He’s also a small-government Republican, and no fan of taxes. Yet when Sinclair officials were looking for a co-chair for the levy campaign, they called Plummer. He said yes. The county Republican Party, which Plummer leads, also endorsed the measure.
“People are fatigued by taxes,” he says. “But I believe in putting my money where it’s valuable.”
Education has mattered in Plummer’s own life and his family’s. He got a two-year degree from the University of Toledo on an athletic scholarship. When he wanted to run for sheriff, a decade ago, he thought he needed a bachelor’s degree to run the department, so he took online courses through the University of Phoenix after his children went to bed. His kids grew up to follow his lead: One is a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, another a nurse with a master’s degree, and the third a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Having gone to college can lead people to see higher education in a more favorable light, the Gallup survey found. Sinclair, Plummer says, is an asset in the community, “a gem.” It trains Dayton’s nurses, firefighters, and EMTs. Teachers and accountants go there to get their first two years of credits at a reduced cost, then transfer to a more-expensive four-year institution. Two years ago, the college and the University of Dayton started the UD Sinclair Academy, a program that allows students who start at Sinclair to seamlessly transfer to the university. Students in some 38 majors can enroll in the academy, and the institutions hope to add a 39th, in nursing, in the coming months. Ninety percent of Sinclair graduates stay local.
Sinclair’s connections in the community are reflected in polling commissioned by the college in the run-up to the tax-levy vote. One in two county residents surveyed had taken a course at Sinclair. Eighty percent said someone in their immediate family had. Asked to respond to the statement “Sinclair has a lot to offer to people like me,” three-quarters answered in the affirmative; more than half strongly agreed. They see the college as reliable, constant.
In that, Sinclair is a rarity. Like many Rust Belt cities, Dayton is a company town that lost its company. In 2009, NCR Corporation, the former National Cash Register Company, announced abruptly that it was shuttering its headquarters in Dayton. Sinclair — along with the University of Dayton and Miami University — are now three of the 10 largest employers in Montgomery County.
Dayton’s retrenchment can be measured not just in job losses but also in a hollowing out of its civic leadership. The Rotary club still meets every Monday in Sinclair’s conference center, but the men and women kibitzing over lunch are predominantly gray-haired. Higher-education institutions were once the “junior, junior partners” on community projects, but now, says Helen E. Jones Kelley, executive director of Montgomery County Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Services, “if you go to a meeting and Steve Johnson or Eric Spina” — the presidents of Sinclair and the University of Dayton — “aren’t in the room, you take notice, because they’re supposed to be there.”
A sense of Sinclair’s engagement is evident on a Friday night in early fall as a group of college staffers set up a small tent on the sidelines of the Valley View High School football field. Germantown is barely 25 minutes out of Dayton, but with its rolling hills and about-to-be-harvested fields of corn, it seems like a world away from Sinclair’s downtown campus.
Ohio takes its high-school football seriously, and so Sinclair officials try to get to one or two games each weekend. As Valley View and rival Bellbrook run warm-ups on the field, a woman stops by to say that both she and her daughter are graduates. Several boys grab mini-footballs with the college’s logo, while Madeline Iseli, Sinclair’s vice president for advancement, does a stand-up spot with the local TV sportscaster.
Friday-night football can be fertile recruiting ground for Sinclair, and tailgates also offer important opportunities for outreach for the college. Prominent endorsers like Plummer are great, but Sinclair also must do constant spadework to build taxpayer support — about a third of its budget, $40 million, comes directly from local taxes. The latest levy, for which the owner of a $100,000 home will pay just under $100 a year, will be used to subsidize tuition for Montgomery County students and for campus building projects, like a new health-sciences center.
Plummer believes Sinclair is a careful steward of taxpayer dollars; about other colleges, he isn’t so sure. He’s running for an open state legislative seat this November and, if elected, he might call for taking a closer look at public-college budgets. “A professor who teaches one class a week and makes $120,000?” he says. “That’s got to stop.”
Except for his time in Toledo, Plummer has spent all of his 54 years in Dayton, and he loves the city with a fierce pride. He has watched the once prominent manufacturing hub hemorrhage jobs, good ones. He worries that despair has taken hold of too many residents, as evidenced by the record 566 deaths from overdoses in Montgomery County last year. “When your only option for work is $13 an hour at a doggone distribution call center,” he says, “well, you can see why we have an opioid epidemic.”
But Plummer is not without hope that things can turn around. That hope is Sinclair.
Plummer views Sinclair as different, maybe even exceptional, because he can see the college’s value every day. It educated his employees, his friends, his neighbors. It’s part of the fabric of the place.
But many Americans’ opinions of higher education are shaped by what they see on television: free-speech flashpoints that have erupted on a dozen or more campuses or masked antifa protesters tussling with police officers.
Curtis P. Maxson was transfixed by the campus demonstrations sparked by Trump’s election. Students marched in the streets in Austin and boycotted classes in Chapel Hill. At Stanford University, they organized a “F*ck Donald Trump” rally.
Maxson wasn’t a student, but after six years of military service — two in the Army, four in the Marine Corps — he was thinking of going back to school. He was dumbfounded, though, by the images on the cable news: “People were literally walking out of classes they were paying thousands of dollars for. Because your candidate didn’t win?”
It made him question whether he’d be welcome on campus as a veteran.
College hadn’t been part of the plan after high school in Centerville, a small town south of Dayton. Maxson had been a so-so student, and then his cousin and his best friend were killed in Afghanistan. Coming from a military family, it felt right to enlist.
Returning to school seemed daunting. He would go from leading a unit of 40 to sitting in introductory lectures with hundreds. His friends who’d gone straight to college had graduated, while he’d be playing catch-up. He would probably be the only one in his class, he joked, who could grow a beard.
On top of that, would people shun him because he had served in the military? He called a friend from home, a fellow veteran who had enrolled at Wright State. “College is way different than you think,” his friend reassured him. “You’ve got to do it.”
So, warily, he did. Maxson is a quiet guy, with the watchful posture of an infantryman on patrol — until he lobs a one-liner from Talladega Nights, the Will Ferrell comedy, into conversation. He decided he would keep his head down and focus on his schoolwork. He would be, he says, “extra cautious.”
Maxson wasn’t alone in seeing the academy as a liberal hothouse, where little that diverges from a left-leaning, multicultural orthodoxy can flourish. Among Republicans who have a negative view of higher education, concern that professors are “bringing their political and social views into the classroom” is the top-cited reason for their mistrust. Also high on the list: the belief that colleges are too preoccupied with “protecting students from views they might find offensive.”
What Maxson was finding at Wright State, however, didn’t match those expectations. For one, he stuck out less than he might have imagined. The university is a magnet for veterans and active-duty service members, 700 this year, many from the Air Force base next door.
The university holds a special orientation for veterans, gives them priority in registering for classes, and has a dedicated lounge and study center for them on campus. On a recent afternoon, a couple of the private rooms were taken up by tutoring sessions, while several students bent over laptops. Another, in a T-shirt and fatigues, napped on a couch.
For Maxson, the veterans center was an oasis. He worked there 15 to 20 hours a week as a peer adviser and dropped by between classes. It became his community.
But college on the whole was less alien, more hospitable, than he had imagined. The class discussions were interesting, the debates respectful.
Mostly, when he found himself disagreeing, it was a matter of life experience, not politics. The younger students hadn’t been on their own, as he had. They hadn’t lived abroad, doing a tour in Afghanistan, as he had. They hadn’t had to make life-or-death choices.
Only once did Maxson feel a line had been crossed, when a guy in one of his classes cracked, Why does the Pentagon have five sides? So a plane could hit it better.
“He looked at me afterward,” Maxson says, “and I don’t think he ever spoke again.”
If he had started Wright State intending to be like a “turtle in a shell,” he was now raising his hand and sharing his thoughts. An economics major, he signed up for a philosophy course specifically for the class discussion. Sometimes the exchanges confirmed his principles; in other cases, they broadened his perspective. Occasionally, he wished people would do their homework. He wished they would have listened, as he had, to Colin Kaepernick’s explanation of how he’d come to kneel during the national anthem after talking with an ex-Green Beret. He wished they wouldn’t insist the quarterback was disrespecting the flag and the military.
He “relished” the times when classmates engaged him and found that his views didn’t align as neatly as they might expect. “I don’t want to be another stereotype,” he says. “I don’t want it to be, ‘He’s a vet, oh, he must be a Trump supporter.’ " Not, mind you, that he ever was.
On most days, the Dayton Early College Academy, a public charter school in the city, is vibrant, maybe even a little boisterous, home base to 350 teenagers.
But on a Friday during fall break, Elaine Arias had the place nearly to herself. She liked it that way, glad for the silence.
Elaine had a lot of work, and she was behind. Many seniors had already finished the fifth of six “gateways” that anchor the high school’s rigorous curriculum. Students spend more than 200 hours doing community service, job shadowing, and internships, and then write papers reflecting on their experience. Elaine still needed to write about her internship at Grandview Medical Center, where she had worked in the ER. She had a research paper to do. College applications had to be completed.
Elaine felt like she was struggling to keep up and had been since she had enrolled at DECA, at the beginning of her freshman year. She hadn’t gone to an academically focused middle school and had little practice juggling assignments and deadlines.
Recently she had quit her fast-food job to “put her all” into school. Most of Elaine’s paycheck went to help support her grandmother in Mexico, and she felt a strong sense of guilt. “I keep telling myself,” she says, “if I focus and I go to medical school, then I’ll really be able to support my grandmother and my parents, too.”
Elaine has a 17-year-old’s smooth complexion but the eyes of someone much older. Not only does she hope to be the first in her family to go to college and on to medical school, but she will be the first to graduate from high school. Both of her parents immigrated to the United States when they were younger than Elaine is today. Her father left school after sixth grade; her mother made it only to third grade.
Elaine got hooked on medicine watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. She kind of likes the gory stuff, and the idea of doing work that helps people, she says, “brings me joy.” Her top choice college is Ohio Wesleyan University because of its high med-school placement rate.
Elaine is acutely aware that when people look at her, a Latina, a first-generation American, they don’t see a future doctor. “They see people like me and they think we work in construction,” she says. “I want to prove those people wrong.” Sometimes, when she’s walking near school, drivers yell that she should “go back to where she’s from,” though the hospital where she was born is five minutes away.
College holds transformational promise for Elaine, and for Dayton, too. City leaders know this. Not long ago, they backed a measure to ensure universal pre-kindergarten for all Dayton 4-year-olds. If you want to prepare students to go to college, you’ve got to start at the beginning.
The city has a long way to go. Just a quarter of Dayton kindergarteners start school ready to learn. Its public schools rank last in the state, earning an F from the Ohio Department of Education. Chronic-absenteeism rates are above 25 percent. On key measures, like reading and math proficiency, performance has actually been slipping.
The best-prepared ninth graders come to DECA reading at the sixth-grade level and doing math at the fourth. Eight in 10 students live in poverty. Almost all are minorities; a few are refugees. It would be easy to dismiss them as “not college material.” DECA tells them they are.
This is the tricky line that those who advocate college for all must navigate. It’s not simply a matter of messaging — students like those at DECA face headwinds from the time they learn their ABCs. They strain under the burden of cumulative disadvantage.
But there are also consequences to dreaming big and falling short. A recent study of graduates of Philadelphia public schools, another poor, urban school district, by researchers at Drexel University found that students who start college but drop out are less likely to be employed than those with an associate or bachelor’s degree. Troublingly, the researchers found that dropouts earn little more than those with just a high-school diploma. In fact, these “noncompleters” may fall further behind, running up debt without getting a degree that will increase their pay.
At DECA, about half of the school’s graduates go on to earn college degrees within six years — far from perfect, but about five times the completion rate for students from schools with similar populations. “We’ve not reached nirvana,” says Judy Hennessey, DECA’s longtime superintendent, “but we’re going in the right direction.”
Before she came to DECA, in 2004, Hennessey used to be superintendent in Oakwood, the neighboring old-money school district that’s one of Ohio’s best. Not all of her students at DECA will become lawyers and doctors, but Hennessey wants to give them every chance to make it. She believes in their potential. “If we want it for Oakwood kids,” she says, “we want it for our kids.”
Daniel Palmer, too, grew up understanding that college could change his life.
When Palmer was in sixth grade, his father was laid off by General Motors, from the job he expected to retire from. He found work as an assistant manager at a grocery store. The hours were long, and the pay barely kept the family above the poverty line. For extra cash, they cleaned churches.
The grocery-store position was actually meant for someone with a college degree, and Palmer’s father was hired only because he said he was going back to school, which he did.
Ever since Palmer could remember, his parents had instilled the importance of college. A degree, they told their children, was opportunity.
But opportunity costs money, and even as a kid, Palmer knew that his family could afford only so much. He vowed to get good grades so that he could win a scholarship, and he gave up on his dream of going away to college.
The Palmers’ financial difficulties were acute, but even families that haven’t faced the whammies of job loss and illness often see college as too pricey. In the Pew survey, eight in 10 Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, said the high cost of tuition is a major reason they think higher education is going in the wrong direction. In Dayton, consternation about the cost of college is pervasive.
If families think college is expensive, it’s because they’ve been paying more and more. Over the past 25 years, the cost of attending a four-year college has doubled, and students and parents are picking up a greater share of the bill. Today, in 28 states, including Ohio, tuition makes up a larger share of public-college revenues than do state appropriations.
Among educators, the explanation for rising tuition seems simple and obvious: Lawmakers are setting aside a smaller portion of state budgets for higher education than in the past. In only six states have college budgets fully recovered from Great Recession cutbacks. Raising tuition is, unfortunately, a way to fill in the gaps.
But that’s not what the average American sees. They see stories about lazy rivers. About climbing walls and dining halls with all-you-can-eat sushi. That the college football coach makes $7.5 million, while their own wages stagnate. They think colleges have too much fat. “Living at some universities, it’s like living at the Ritz,” said a local business leader and the father of three school-age daughters. He is a supporter of education. “Just because student debt is terrible, it doesn’t mean college is bad,” he said. “But — I don’t think they should be building the Ritz-Carlton, with a spa.”
Daytonians think their local colleges are affordable, sort of. Tuition at Sinclair is $116 per credit hour, among the lowest in the state. Students who live off-campus at Wright State pay $4,600 a semester.
That’s what Palmer does, living at home and commuting 25 miles each way to classes. A scholarship helps pay for tuition, and on the weekends, he referees high-school and Division III football games. Pretty much everyone he knows at Wright State works. Two weekends of refereeing will pay for textbooks for the semester.
If he feels cheated of the college experience he thought he’d have, living in a dorm and hanging out on the quad, Palmer, now a senior, doesn’t say so. Unlike many commuter students, he’s made time to get involved on campus. He joined Model UN. Last spring he ran for student-body president and won.
With other members of student government, Palmer traveled to the state capital, Columbus, to urge lawmakers to exempt textbooks from state sales tax. It’s not just tuition, he argues, but all the other costs of attending college that add up. “There’s been a 612-percent increase in the cost of textbooks since 1986,” he says, with the ease — if not the demeanor — of a practiced lobbyist. That’s way more than the increase in the Consumer Price Index.
The tax exemption didn’t pass, but Palmer was left with a bug for politics. He hopes to go to law school after he graduates and eventually run for office. He thinks he can help people. Maybe he can even help them afford college.
That’s the thing with college: Going costs a lot. Not going can cost even more.
Maybe, then, people’s views of their local college and their skepticism of this giant entity we call “higher education” aren’t so inconsistent. We value what makes our lives better. And we really value what makes our children’s lives better. But if those guarding the gate seem out of touch, if they charge too much, if they don’t seem to share our values? Well, it’s enough to make someone resent the whole system.
For many in Dayton and across the country, “college” is a place we know, familiar, a home for our aspirations and our ambitions. “Higher education,” though, can seem altogether different — abstract, remote. It harbors our fears and anxieties.
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.