Youngstown State expands into Steubenville as calls to consolidate Ohio’s universities ramp up

Youngstown State University is opening a new campus this fall – just as the conversation about shrinking Ohio’s public universities grows louder.

The university’s first regional campus is on the former site of Eastern Gateway Community College in Steubenville. University President Bill Johnson said the new outpost will be a lean operation.

There will be no campus dean or a “bunch of overhead people,” he said. Technology help, financial aid and other services will run out of the Youngstown campus. Johnson said this approach is saving a “tremendous amount” of overhead costs.

“This is essentially another building of Youngstown State University,” he said. “It’s just an hour and nine minutes away.”

Johnson said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine “loves this model.” In fact, according to Johnson, Youngstown State’s push into southeastern Ohio was first seeded by DeWine in late 2023, months prior to Eastern Gateway’s eventual shutdown.

It was also years before current Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy began calling to reform the state’s 14 public universities due to continued enrollment and financial challenges.

“When you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence, who are actually the best in their respective domains instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state,” Ramaswamy said in a video .

Johnson said he’s spoken with state gubernatorial candidates – though he declined to name them – who also like the university’s expansion plans. Ramaswamy’s calls to consolidate sparked pushback from his Democratic rival, Dr. Amy Acton, and others across the state.

In addition to Youngstown State, eight of Ohio’s 14 public universities already operate regional outposts. These campuses often offer cheaper tuition rates, smaller class sizes and pathways that allow students to easily move to a university’s main campus for advanced degrees.

Youngstown State looks to build trust with southeastern Ohio residents

Southeastern Ohio is familiar to Johnson. He represented the area for more than a decade as a Republican U.S. Congressman before taking over Youngstown State’s top spot in 2024.

During that time, he said, he learned that the region’s residents often felt like they went unnoticed. About 27% of Steubenville’s 18,000 citizens live in poverty.

“When it came to economic investment, highways, roads, bridges, you name it, they saw too many times (that) the money would go to Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati,” he said.

Eastern Gateway, the community college in Steubenville, closed in fall 2024. The closure meant residents “no longer had access to choices in higher education,” Johnson said. The city was left with one small private Catholic university and another community college about an hour away.

Eastern Gateway’s closure came a year after the U.S. Department of Education said the institution illegally charged students receiving Pell Grants, federal funding awarded to those with high amounts of financial need, more than others. The state auditor later knocked the college’s leadership for “derelict accounting” and questionable spending.

In a November 2025 debrief to Youngstown State’s board, Johnson said the Eastern Gateway saga contributed to a lack of trust between local residents and higher education institutions.

“We’re not going to quit on them,” he told Signal Statewide.

Johnson said university leaders will try to build that trust themselves by keeping the promises they make. He said their biggest pledge to the community comes through the academic programs offered at the Steubenville campus. The fall 2026 semester will offer 14 certificate and associate’s degrees in areas such as welding, nursing and business.

Eventually, he said, students will be able to access “a portfolio of programs unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.” He pointed to a potential petroleum engineering program, given the area’s ties to the oil and gas industry, as an example of how the campus’ offerings will be tailored to local workforce needs.

“We are flexible and agile,” he said. “And we are sitting on go.”

How Eastern Gateway’s complicated wind-down process impacts Youngstown State

Youngstown State officials assumed – “like most everybody else did,” said Johnson – that the Eastern Gateway handoff would be a relatively seamless one when the conversations began in 2023.

That wasn’t the case. Eastern Gateway’s complicated wind-down process took several years. By then, Johnson said, “there was no faculty, there was no staff, there were no students.”

And no students means a big chunk of state financial support is gone – for now, anyway. Average enrollment size is one of the factors that determine how much money lawmakers give to public institutions. The overall amount of that funding has declined over the past four decades.

Johnson said Youngstown State also ended up investing about $7 million to develop and earn approval for the Steubenville campus’ first slate of academic programs.

The state did ultimately provide about $3 million in startup money. Jefferson County gave the Steubenville campus to the university, though the county kept some of the property for future development.

‘We need them to come back’

Now, Johnson said, the Steubenville campus is “starting from scratch to rebuild that enrollment.”

The university declined to share any enrollment projections for the fall, though Johnson said he wants to get back to the more than 3,000 students Eastern Gateway enrolled more than a decade ago.

If the state’s other 24 regional campuses are any indication, it may be a tough task. Enrollment at those locations is declining. More than 33,900 full-time students enrolled in 2005. Two decades later, that number fell by about 14.5% to 28,993 students.

Youngstown State leaders are trying to get the word out about the university’s entry into the area. Johnson and Provost Jennifer Adams made the rounds on local Steubenville television stations ahead of a campus open house event last month.

They’re making the case to parents and families that the Steubenville campus “is going to give their children and their grandchildren the kind of higher education that they need and want to pursue their version of the American dream,” said Johnson.

Johnson’s feeling optimistic. He said they’ve already received a “significant” number of applications. Yet all of the years of preparation ultimately come down to if – and how many – students arrive on campus this fall.

“We need them to come back,” Johnson said. “And, I dare say, we need them to come back quickly.”

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This story was originally published by Signal Ohio and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.