The grant from the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation is worth 9 million dollars, spread across the seven states, with 900-thousand of that earmaked for Ohio.
A previous, much smaller Lumina grant was used to identify impediments to academic progress and help students overcome them, and begin tracking students after they leave school to determine whether they continue their educations elsewhere.
The foundation was sufficiently impressed with Ohio's initiatives to award this new grant, which will go toward merging and sharing administrative operations throughout the public university system.
Kristin Conklin is with the foundation's consulting agency HCM Strategists.
KRISTIN CONKLIN: "Ohio is going to build on its common technology platform. it's gonna look at how to do shared services for back office operations. Ohio plans to use one of the nation's pre-eminent consultants to help them extend shared services across the state."
Each of the states receiving these new grants agrees to report back over the next four years, and to make their portion of the experiments available for any other state to examine, and potentially implement.
