The Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc. is an academic and administrative consortium of five selective private liberal arts colleges in the US state of Ohio. It is a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1995 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions. The Five Colleges of Ohio has since developed an array of collaborative projects designed to respond to three fundamental purposes: 1) Provide cost savings or cost avoidance and new funding resources at Ohio Five colleges 2) Promote scholarship and academic innovation on Ohio Five campuses 3) Improve the Ohio Five's competitive advantage in admissions and faculty recruiting
Members
The members of The Five Colleges of Ohio consortium are:
The designation Ohio Five first appeared in Ohio newspapers in the early twentieth century. The grouping, predating any formal agreement, was immediately adopted by the press as a foreshadowing of an Ohio league of schools with similar academic and athletic reputations, which, at the time was a common perception. Following informal discussions among the five colleges in the early 1990s, the consortium was formalized by the incorporation of the organization on June 30, 1995. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded in June 1995, provided for the development of a joint library system, establishment of an administrative structure, and investigation of the benefits and methods for sharing digital images and multimedia resources, establishing The Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc. as a legal entity. Collaboration among the five colleges occurs in several areas:
Academic Programs
Administrative Programs and Technology
Libraries
Academic programs
The colleges have worked together on grants and long-term projects to support curricular development, faculty collaborations, and opportunities for students. These projects have included: In language teaching:
a four-year project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to strengthen foreign language learning through collaborative use of technology
, a Mellon-funded program which placed thirteen postdoctoral fellows in languages from The Ohio State University for two-year terms and provided opportunities for faculty to collaborate on teaching and scholarship project. In its final phase in 2018-19, the project included a test of three advanced Chinese language courses shared among four of the colleges via distance technology.
In curricular development:
2005-2006, a multi-year project funded by The Teagle Foundation that developed tools to assess outcomes of a liberal arts education: creativity and critical thinking.
2015-2019 supported a comprehensive initiative offering structured ways for students to complete general education requirements and create coherent understanding of their educational pathways.
In student opportunities:
offers science students at the Five Colleges of Ohio an opportunity to engage in summer research activities in Ohio State University laboratories.
In 2012, the Ohio Five resolved to identify and implement a to automate purchasing and contract administration across the colleges and realize related savings through joint purchasing plans and contracts. A $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2014 supported system installation and a full-time staff member was hired to supervise the program. Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College and Ohio Wesleyan University moved forward together to develop the program, which realized an estimated $500,000 in contract savings in its first fully implemented year in 2015-16. In 2017-18, more than 4,300 suppliers were active in the e-procurement system representing an annual spend of $4.483 million. Since 2014, the Five Colleges have also collaborated on a shared online work order system enabling the colleges to optimize workflow in facilities management and maintenance and track expenditures. Risk management, disaster planning, Title IX training and investigative services and information technologies represent additional areas in which the college work together to support training and cost savings. The Ohio Five also maintains a for employment opportunities in faculty, staff, and administration at the Five Colleges
Libraries
The libraries of Denison University, Kenyon College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and The College of Wooster share an integrated library system called CONSORT. This multi-college system maximizes the colleges' abilities to share collection resources and collaborate on collection-related databases and publications. Oberlin College maintains its own integrated library system called . Since the founding of the Five Colleges, its libraries have worked together to support the development of the CONSORT system and promote institutional priorities in digital literacy and digital scholarship. Joint library projects have included:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided significant support for three projects focusing on digital scholarship:
, a project to support curricular innovations to deepen student capacity in using information resources.
, which funded the development of digital collections by faculty and librarians
, which created digital resources to enhance faculty and student research, teaching, and learning using emerging aspects of media literacy, scholarly communication, information literacy, information management and digital publishing.
Governance
The Five Colleges of Ohio is governed by its five presidents who form the organization's board of trustees. led by cabinet officers of each college supervise finance and business operations, academic affairs, library programs and information technology. The Five Colleges of Ohio is managed by a of five who supervise the organization's activities from offices located throughout the consortium, with a central office at Oberlin College.
