3 questions with … Sean Creighton, SOCHE president

‘We’re a regional voice for higher education.’

For a community its size, the Miami Valley has a lot of colleges. A private Catholic university. A rapidly growing four-year state university on the doorstep of the nation’s largest Air Force base. A community college recognized statewide. Historically black colleges. A liberal arts college where the emphasis sometimes seems to be on the “liberal.”

And more.

For all that real diversity, Sean Creighton, president of the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education — better known as SOCHE — knows the concerns and issues that unite them.

Creighton likens SOCHE to Switzerland, a neutral stage where jostling interests can better see what is mutually beneficial.

“We’re a very safe place,” he said.

SOCHE was born in March 1967 by 10 founding colleges, so they could share best practices, control costs, improve courses and more.

All colleges face a shared set of problems and imperatives. Admissions, financial aid, state support (or the lack of it) and capital improvements are issues no college can ignore. SOCHE also connects local employers to the student interns they need.

Creighton does more than helm SOCHE. For the event’s first two years, he co-chaired TEDx Dayton, the city’s take on the internationally loved speaker series, and he’s the TEDx license holder for the series’ local iteration.

I sat down with him recently for 3 Questions. This is edited and condensed.

Q: Stepping back, it sometimes seems Dayton has a lot of colleges and universities. Is that a mistaken impression?

Creighton: "For a city our size, we have a concentration, a diversity and density of good institutions that rivals anywhere in this country. The SOCHE membership alone is 120,000 students-strong. We're 36,000 jobs, a $3.3 billion economic impact, 16,000 graduates a year. The supply side of talent — we're really fortunate to have that.

“It’s interesting because they are such different institutions, starting with all the privates (colleges) that moved out here back in the mid-180os to set up camp. For some of them, they were new pioneers going out west.

“Then the state expansion of community colleges and publics (colleges) resulted in what we have today in our region.”

Q: What were the needs that drove SOCHE’s founding?

Creighton: "It was pretty forward-thinking and visionary, especially at the time, 1967 …

“The leaders of the founding institutions — there were 10 members founding SOCHE — the (institutional) presidents at that time created a mechanism that was focused on finding ways to work together, whether that was leveraging one another to go after a collaborative grant, to bring new resources to those institutions, or just to leverage proximity and create opportunities for students — they couldn’t take classes at one institution, but they could take classes at another.

“Really, that was the whole foundation, to have something in the middle. And that is still what we do today. The language we like to use, and it gets a little technical, is, ‘We’re the collaborative infrastructure for higher ed.’ We do like to translate that into more common words. We are the coordinating body for our members, which are the colleges and universities in Southwestern Ohio.”

“We’re a regional voice for higher education. If weighing in on state or federal issues, we’ll do a little bit of that. When SOCHE speaks on behalf of its members, it’s a very diverse membership. And I think that reflects our region.”

Q: So what problems keep college presidents up at night?

Creighton: Problems are "constant. They're ongoing. And the system we have today, it wasn't necessarily designed for all these challenges. So we're navigating these contemporary challenges and then the lingering past challenges that have carried over for decades. Then the bureaucracy of creating programs. You can't just create a program overnight. You want accountability. You want quality. You want all these things in place.

“What’s the return on investment for institutions? There’s a high demand for them to start these new programs. We need this, we need this … But what ultimately is the return on investment? (Presidents) want to invest in the core we currently have.

“But then you see all kinds of innovative leadership going on … The UD (University of Dayton)-GE Aviation partnership … what a great example of a Dayton partnership between the university and a company. A deep, deep partnership. They built their $54 million research center (the Electrical Power Integrated Systems Center on River Park Drive) on the UD campus …

“Think about the kind of the leadership it took to think along those lines.”

Know someone who can handle Three Questions? We're looking for behind-the-scenes-but-still fascinating Miami Valley residents with something to say. Send your suggestions to tom.gnau@coxinc.com.

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