Five Colleges of Ohio

The Five Colleges of Ohio 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 consortium developed from a range of highly successful collaborations including friendly academic and athletic rivalries among the five institutions.

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. During the 1800s, in their evangelistic campaign to build a Christian community across the U.S. from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Protestant churches of the 19th century used the denominational college as an intellectual stronghold. By the Civil War era, the churches had founded some 40 colleges in Ohio alone, to ensure for the state a Christian core and to train the ministers who plodded after the frontiersmen across the plains. Empty treasuries and denominational rivalry had closed all but 20 of these Ohio colleges by the 1950s. Of the survivors, five colleges -- Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and The College of Wooster -- were often grouped together because of their high academic standing.

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. The five colleges had been affiliated as members of state and national educational and athletic organizations and had enjoyed friendly rivalry in various academic and athletic competitions, similar to Little Three in New England.

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.

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