The views and opinions expressed into the points are those of the host of the program and its guests.

They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of public media.

This week, on to the point.

We sit down with the man leading one of our region's most important institutions, Doctor James Holloway, president of the University of Toledo.

With enrollment declining, programs being restructured, and students questioning the value of a college degree.

Universities are being forced to adapt like never before.

How is Utoledo responding and what does it mean for students, families and our region?

We'll get answers.

And here is vision for the future.

Right.

Now, on to the point I'm Doni Miller.

Connect with us on our social media pages.

But you know how to do that.

You also know that you can email me at Doni underscore Miller at wgte dot org and for this episode and any additional extras, go to wgte dot org to the point.

I am really excited.

Today we have with us Doctor James Holloway.

I have to read your intro.

Oh, dear.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I paired it down significantly.

You were the 19th president at the University of Toledo.

You happen to be a nuclear engineer, and you're an accomplished academic leader.

Your bio is extraordinarily impressive.

You've previously served as the provost at the University of New Mexico.

You spent three decades at the University of Michigan.

If we were not in Ohio, I would, but we are.

I read for the rockets.

That's exactly the right answer.

You've championed research, growth and research, student success and global engagement.

Those are the things that you focus on the very most in your career.

You've stepped into this role at and absolutely pivotal, pivotal moment for higher education, not just here in Toledo, but around the country.

As I mentioned in the promo.

The country is facing declining enrollments, financial pressures, changing expectations from students and families.

With all of that facing this university as well.

What do you consider your priority at this point?

So in some ways, you've outlined my priorities by outlining the challenges.

So our overall priority for the University of Toledo is really to grow in order to be the best partner and supporter for this community that we can be.

One of the reasons I came to Toledo is I was very much looking for a university that was about its place.

The University of Toledo is about Toledo.

It's about Northwest Ohio.

It's about this region.

And I think that's really important at this moment in higher education.

Universities have to be about a place, about a community that will support them.

When people critique higher ed.

It's often in the abstract.

It's about universities that have nothing to do with their lives.

My goal for the University of Toledo is to have be a critical resource for this region.

I want us to be the educator of young people in this region, the provider of health care in this region.

Through our research, the provider of solutions in this region.

And so our agenda is for growth.

We're calling our next strategic plan growing for Toledo, because it really is about this, this city that bore us and this region that supports us.

And so our priorities really are to grow enrollment both through tactical and strategic means.

It's to increase our research impact and especially to focus on research that matters to this region.

That addresses the challenges and opportunities here.

And it's to focus on growing our impact on health care.

Through our clinics, through our hospital, through the education of the health care workforce that all of the region's health care providers rely on.

So really, it's all of those things.

But the underlying theme for me is to grow in order to support this community.

And I think that's critical.

Again, it's where higher education will succeed, is when it very visibly is supporting and is about a place.

And the University of Toledo is really special in this way.

It's a research university with an academic health system that is about a place.

Not every research university is about its place, but the University of Toledo is.

So it's a powerhouse university that is also dedicated to a region.

And I think that's an incredible combination for young learners and for the university and for the region that supports us.

So may we start with the issue of enrollment?

Sure.

The challenge is a formidable one.

How do you intend to get students interested in staying in Toledo?

One of the wonderful things about going to college is being able to go away to college.

So how do you intend to get local kids interested?

How do you intend to retain them?

Because retention is a major issue again across the country.

And how do you intend to adjust your offerings, as I assume you will have to do so that it's there's still addressing core academic requirements, but responding to the interests of of what the trend seem to be these days.

Sure.

That's a big question.

It is so, so so let me let me start with, with some kind of of level setting.

So across the country, 50% of students travel less than 20 miles to go to college.

70% travel less than less than 50 miles to go to college.

So actually most students, most learners stay locally.

And so being able to attract students locally is not fundamentally a challenge.

Now th University of Toledo tactically has to execute in our when we look at our undergraduate population, we have to tactically execute properly.

And so one of the things the University of Toledo didn't do for years is recruit sophomores and juniors in high school.

That's a huge mistake.

You don't go and just recruit seniors from high school, because if you do, they might apply, but you're their 10th choice.

Sure.

You have to build the relationship when we're when they're juniors in high school and they're sophomores in high school.

That's what we started to do about a year ago.

And we see now huge increases in students saying that they're interested in coming to us in fall of 2027.

That is, these are the sophomores and particularly the juniors that we've worked with all year who are now saying, oh, you know, I'm thinking about now that I'm a senior.

I'm thinking about applying to you and coming there.

So you're doing a better job of telling your story to the audiences where it matters telling, telling the story better and to the right audiences.

Because we were we were kind of ignoring an audience.

That was a tactical mistake on our part.

Strategically, you you hit some of the key notions that we have to really think of what we're offering to students.

We're offering to learners.

Many, many of our young people, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, are very interested now in making sure that their college experience, yes, is an important social experience as a growth experience, but also leads to success in their career after they graduate.

And so I always talk about that where Metropolitan Research University focused on the success of our students after they graduate.

Sure.

Graduation by itself is not success.

You have to graduate and be able to pursue your aspiration.

So we've been over the last really couple of years developing new degrees that are addressing that.

Give an example.

We're one of the only programs in the country where you can do cosmetic science design.

How do you design cosmetics?

How do you design skin care products?

How do you design hair care products?

That's science right?

That's a that's a chemistry biology a set of work.

It's very highly technical.

We're one of the only in the country we can get a degree in that.

And that's proved incredibly popular.

Yeah, right.

And the students are flooding into that.

This this fall were launching a new degree that's starting this fall in health care analytics and and health care value values a technical term in health care.

But really it's, you know, how do you develop health care systems that deliver better health care outcomes?

And we've started a degree in that.

And that one's starting this fall.

We started a degree in materials science.

And that's an interesting one for us.

So it's a technical discipline, a huge demand for folks who have expertise in how do you design materials to accomplish specific goals in the world and think everything from your iPhone screen to the turbine blades and the jet engine, very highly specialized materials.

That is also a degree that happens to build on incredible strengths that we have as a research university.

We're one of the most highly cited universities in the country, in the world, actually for scientific papers on material science.

So we build on our strengths and we build degrees that really address career directions and career goals that students are really interested in.

You know, one of the things that that concerns me about the redesigns in universities is that I think universities are one of the few remaining bastions of of civility, and the humanities are critical, I think, just in helping us be better individuals.

Do you have any thoughts about how you're going to support those programs while you're moving toward those more trendy, the trendier ones?

Yeah, and I think both are important.

And we have many students in the arts, for example, at that University of Toledo, both visual arts and performing arts, which are both very strong programs.

If I look at our arts program, it is both a program that you might think of in a traditional way.

It's about creativity.

It's about learning maker skills, but it actually has built into it professional skills, professionalism skills for artists.

How do you be a professional art So I think it's a good example of bringing together one of those, those kind of liberal arts and sciences degrees with that focus on success post-graduation.

And we've just launched a program we call ascend.

And the idea of ascend is every undergraduate student will have a experience based learning opportunity.

And so for a student in nursing that's kind of built in their clinicals, students and engineering, it's kind of built in already.

It's their co-ops that we're one of only eight engineering schools in the country that have a required co-op in business.

It's their internships, but in English that can also be, oh, I'm going to I'm going to learn how to edit.

I'm going to be in take on an internship as an editor, or I'm going to edit a publication as part of my work.

And so we're trying to take all of those programs, the humanities, the sciences, engineering, health care and infuse them with this experience based learning, because that will let all of those students develop the wisdom to be successful after they leave.

And in some ways, I want when students leave, I want them to feel like they're not going after their first job.

They've already done something.

And what they've done in college, they can show to a potential employer and say, see, I majored in sociology, and these are the this is the community group that I worked with and how how I made a difference in that community.

Hold that thought.

We have to go away for just a minute.

I want to come back and talk about Di initiatives and a few other things.

All right, all right.

We'll be right back.

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And if you want to see this episode again or any of the 90 others we've done, please go to gte dot org to the point, we are speaking to Doctor James Holloway, who is the 19th president at the University of Toledo.

If you missed the first segment, you really need to go to that website so you can take a look at it.

Fascinating.

We're talking about at this point in our conversation, enrollment, enrollment challenges, your response to those challenges?

One of the major challenges, again, at all universities around the country is recruiting and retaining folks of color, children of color.

It is certainly, these days, a tricky problem to try and manage, given the country's approach to to dye issues and the the legislative initiatives that you all have to respond to in that regard.

Any thoughts about how the University of Toledo will address those issues?

Sure.

And you know, first I'd like to say that I think it's incredibly important as a university that is about its place.

And I often call us the university for Toledo.

It's really important.

I like that, by the way.

It's really important that we represent Toledo.

We represent the people of Toledo and the people of Toledo.

Come in.

There are many forms, many, many beliefs, many colors.

It's really important that we represent all of that, including people of color.

It's incredibly important.

And what we can't what what the legislation in the state of Ohio has done is, is say we hear programs you can't do, but it doesn't change the fact that we can still say, look, it's really important that people of color find their way to the University of Toledo, that we help them find their way to the University of Toledo.

Recruiting actively in the Toledo public schools is one tool to do that.

Making sure that people feel seen on campus is another.

And so, for example, we have a very active divine nine.

The African-American fraternities and sororities, making sure that that those students feel seen that I, you know, I attend their events.

I make sure that they know that we see them, that they are at the university, they are part of who we are, and we support all students.

But it's important for groups who have felt marginalized to know that they are, in fact, being seen and acknowledged.

And those are things we can do.

And it doesn't it doesn't require offices or programs.

It just requires presence.

It requires that each of us pay attention to all of our students, engage with them, see what their challenges are, and respond to those challenges and different students different challenges.

So so I think that's an important tool that we can use to make sure that students feel acknowledged and feel that they can find success.

We want every student at the university to know that, as they find everyone in college faces challenges, and as you find those challenges, whoever you are, there are people at the university you can go to and say, I've got this problem, help or I've got this problem.

What do you suggest?

So, so I think that's incredibly important.

And I think we're being successful in doing that because again, our goal is that every student should be successful at the university.

That's a challenge students come in with with very different backgrounds.

Many of our students have financial challenges.

So another important piece is making sure that we have the right financial aid structures in place to help students.

And one of the things I'm very proud of is in in the state of Ohio, there's a small set of research universities where one of them, we are the least expensive of the major research universities from a net price standard, because we've done our financial aid well.

So trying to keep our cost, the actual cost to students control, that's another tool to try and make sure that all students can succeed at the institution.

And so attention is important.

And recognizing that all students are welcome and making sure we get that message out there doesn't mean we won't mess up on occasion.

We ensure.

But but it's really important for me to be out there constantly saying everyone is welcome with the University of Toledo and I want you to succeed.

Yeah, that's it's a really complicated issue, this, this issue of Di and kids of color and the way that you approach their, their recruitment and their retention far more complicated than we have time to talk about today.

But I'd love to to have time at on some other show to talk to you about that in greater detail.

But I do appreciate that you've acknowledged that it is an issue that requires attention and perhaps a bit of special attention.

So thank you for all you do in that regard.

Some of your other initiatives they'll have to do with with taking telling your story around innovation.

Sure.

Your approach to that.

Yeah.

You know, for me, this is part of what's special about a university like the University of Toledo.

So we're a so-called R1 research university.

And what that means is that we're really doing research at the very highest level in the nation and the world, really.

And we also have an academic health center, which gives us another advantage.

What that means to a student is when you come to the University of Toledo, you're learning in an environment where knowledge is always new, in a place where the discoveries are made and it's different.

It's different to learn to learn Shakespeare from a scholar who just knows Shakespeare, and the scholar who actually studies Shakespeare and Elizabethan England, and the context of in which those plays were written.

It's just a different experience.

Absolutely.

And so, so the research piece of the university is very important.

It's also one of the ways that we really serve this region and the nation more broadly.

And so the research we do in transplant science, which translates into our incredible success at doing kidney transplants, the research we do in glass science and in photovoltaics, which translates into supporting the glass industries of this region.

And so we're a key player in the Northwest Ohio Glass Innovation hub.

We've recently hired a glass scientist.

Not many universities hire scientists focused solely on glass.

I didn't know there was such a thing.

But this is the Glass city.

And so we found one.

They're not many, but we hired that glass scientist specifically because he can help look at some of the challenges and opportunities of the industries of this region.

And so as we as we think about our research work, we're thinking about, of course, creating fundamental new knowledge, but we're also thinking about also where are there important challenges or opportunities in the region that we can address.

And another example of that is the, you know, the Toledo water crisis in 2014 when when algal bloom started to become a problem for the region, and we put together a water task force because we have a bunch of experts in algae, shallow lake dynamics, the how, how phosphorus and nitrate nitrogen get into the lake, the health effects of the toxins and the whole thing.

Right.

And so our ability to do fundamental research that also addresses a challenge, like the harmful algal blooms problem, that's what a research university can do.

And it's kind of one of the things that I find very exciting.

Another that we've just launched, we've just launched something called the Northwest Ohio Cancer Research Institute.

Turns out that northwest Ohio has a higher prevalence of cancer than you would expect, higher than even the rest of Ohio.

And so cancer is an issue here.

And so we've got over 40 faculty who do research in aspects related to cancer, from fundamental biology to to treatment science.

And so we're pulling those folks together in this Northwest Ohio Cancer Research Institute to start to try and look at, okay, what are these fundamental issues in this region?

And at the same time, across the world in how how cancers develop, how you treat cancers, how you prevent cancers, how you extend life depending on kind of the details of the cancer.

But that's the kind of work that a research university can do and that I'm very excited about and that we bring students into.

So, for example, every student in the physics department does authentic research with faculty.

That's that's one of those experience based learning opportunities that we provide.

Our one of our faculty who does work on those algal blooms.

I don't think he says no to any student who shows up at the door of his lab.

They get pulled in and and man, he's got a boatload of students in there looking at those challenges around algal blooms.

So so that opportunity for students is important to it's a part of that what a research university brings.

Yeah.

That is a large part of your initiative toward a more health, toward a healthier Toledo.

Well, yeah.

So we've got you know, I've organized my thinking over, over the next few years into three buckets, what I call advantage Toledo, which is really about experiential learning, the student experience, student success experience, and experience based learning.

Innovate Toledo is about our research enterprise in all of its aspects and helping the economy of the region.

And then the third is Healthy Toledo.

And that's that's part in recognition of the fact that Lucas County, for example, is 77th out of the 88 counties in health outcomes.

It's amazing.

We got to do something about that.

The University of Toledo does public health work.

We educate the health care workforce.

We do research and health.

We provide a large treatment platform in our hospitals and clinics.

We're the only institution in the region that does all of those things some other institutions do.

Some of them were the only one that does all of them.

So I look at that and think, well, as the university for Toledo, we should be thinking about how we're very explicitly trying to improve the health of the region because it is a it's an important challenge.

It's an important challenge.

And when we started or in preparation for our time together, I think I told you that there was absolutely no way we were going to be able to talk about all of the incredible things that that you have in your vision for Toledo on this show, and we that is absolutely true.

We are running out of time.

You will come back, though, I hope, and in the 30s we have left, if there was a message that you would give to Toledo about your vision and what they can expect from the university, what would it be?

I think the University of Toledo is incredibly important for this region, and I think this region is incredibly important for the university.

I see success of the university as critical, therefore, for this region.

And because of that, my my aim is to grow, to grow our enrollment, grow our research impact, grow our ability to deliver health care.

And I think we can do it because everyone I've talked to in this area for the last year has been 100% supportive on your team.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for your leadership, and I'm going to hold you to your promise to come back and thank you guys for spending this time with me.

I will see you next time.

On to the point.

Have a wonderful day.

The views and opinions expressed into the points are those of the host of the program and its guests.

They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of public media.

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