The Ohio State University

09/24/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/24/2024 07:16

Ohio State on the rise in new ranking of public universities

Ohio State campus and the Columbus skyline in the background
Photo: Getty Images
24
September
2024
|
09:00 AM
America/New_York

Ohio State on the rise in new ranking of public universities

Undergraduate business, engineering, nursing programs rank in top 10

The Ohio State University

The Ohio State University has improved in rankings of public and national universities, according to a new survey from U.S. News & World Report.

Ohio State ranked 15th among public universities and 41st in the nation in the new Best Colleges rankings for 2025. It's an improvement of two spots in both categories.

"Ohio State is one of the best public universities in the nation with outstanding students, faculty and staff who are passionate about solving the world's most pressing challenges," President Walter "Ted" Carter Jr. said. "The university just enrolled a record-setting first-year class, we have a world-class academic medical center that continues to excel at patient care and life-changing research, and a worldwide network of nearly 620,000 alumni."

In addition to the overall rankings, the university continues to be rated among the top 10 in a variety of academic programs. The College of Nursing's Bachelor of Science in Nursing program is ranked first among public universities and 4th nationally.

In the Fisher College of Business, the undergraduate business program ranked 7th among public universities and 14th nationally. The undergraduate engineering degree program in the College of Engineeringwas ranked 12th among publics and 20th in the nation, its highest ranking to date. Ohio State's program is ranked in the category of universities offering an engineering doctorate.

For the first time, the university joined the ranks of top universities for first-year experience, ranking 50th nationally. The survey of efforts to make new students feel connected to their campus community is only in its second year for U.S. News & World Report.

Ohio State remains among the top universities for commitment to military-connected students. The new report ranks the university 15th among public institutions and 22nd nationally, up two spots.

Now in its 40th year, the Best Colleges issue evaluates nearly 1,500 colleges and universities on up to 17 measures of academic quality. Ohio State is ranked in a peer group of more than 400 national universities.

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24
,
| 08:00 AMAmerica/New_York

Coral reefs will continue to experience severe heat stress as rising temperatures cause the oceans to become unbearably hot - but a new study shows that altering their feeding habits could allow local populations to avoid total extinction.

Research into two species of coral native to Hawaii revealed that warmer waters caused by climate change play an important role in coral bleaching - a process that causes coral to lose their color - significantly disrupting coral health and growth. The effect that ocean acidification, a process that causes seawater to become more acidic due to the excess amount of carbon dioxide it has absorbed, has on heat-stressed coral was also investigated.

Over the last decade, there has been a rise in the incidence and severity of mass coral bleaching eventsaround the globe, leading to increased mortality for these vital organisms.

However, this work suggests that some coral may well be resilient to these extreme environmental changes, said Kerri Dobson, lead author of the study who completed the work as a graduate student in earth sciences at the Ohio State University.

"Each coral species responds differently to stress and employs different methods to recover from that stress," said Dobson, who currently teaches marine biology at the University of Southampton in the U.K. "Now we know that those responses depend on several factors."

According to the study, which was recently published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, one of the most telling influences that can decide if coral might recover from a stressful event is its access to food.

Typically, corals feed by receiving nutrition provided by photosynthetic symbiotic algae and catching and eating tiny aquatic organisms called zooplankton. These algae also give coral their vibrant color, but when heat stressed, corals lose their algae, leaving them bleached white and starving.

In this work, researchers collected branch samples from bleached and non-bleached parent colonies following one large-scale heat-stress event in 2014 as well as a second, unexpected, heat-stress event in 2015. Once rehoused in special tanks, half of the corals were subjected to a different amount of food and simulated ocean acidification rates to see how these factors affected their potential recovery.

"This is one of the first studies, to our knowledge, that has been able to capture the impact of natural thermal stress on coral in two consecutive years," Dobson said.

As a result of such unique long-term data, the team found that feeding coral zooplankton after a bleaching event could improve their overall resilience to warming temperatures, essentially minimizing mortality, promoting growth and enhancing coral recovery rates.

Ocean acidification did little to slow the corals' recovery, suggesting that some corals could survive in more acidic waters. Unfortunately, this discovery also makes clear that the most present danger to coral reefs is heat stress, said Dobson.

"Heat stress affected the corals' health much more than the simulated ocean acidification," she said. "These heat-stress events function as selection forces, leaving only the more thermally tolerant coral that might be able to survive the stresses that we're subjecting them to."

Finally, the study's findings emphasize the importance of understanding the conditions and evolutionary strategies that contribute to long-term coral survivorship, said Dobson. Moreover, this research offers a path for scientists and watch groups to better customize management and restoration efforts for coral reefs based on their species and location.

"This paper adds to our body of knowledge about coral resilience," said Andrea Grottoli, senior author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State. "It gives us more leverage in following up on evaluating how we can protect corals and manage bleaching events by manipulating the environment to their favor."

While predictions about coral survivorship in the face of human-induced climate change do make room for hope concerning the fate of corals, these assumptions are based on the adherence to current climate mitigation goals, said Grottoli.

For example, it is possible that corals could adapt enough to survive a 2 degree Celsiusincrease in global temperatures. However, Earth's current unmitigated acceleration to 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century could eradicate coral completely, she said.

As the next few decades are critical to determining the reality of these scenarios, Dobson's future work will continue to investigate the impact of thermal stress on the ecology of coral reefs in other regions.

"When you do experiments with living animals in a natural setting, there's always some degree of unpredictability, as we saw with the unexpected second heat-stress event we studied," said Grottoli. "Ultimately, you have to roll with it because the work matters, and sometimes the things you didn't plan to learn are the parts that are the most interesting."

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors include Jeremy C. Williams and Rowan H. McLachlan from Ohio State and Christopher P. Jury and Robert J. Toonen from the University of Hawai'i.

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