Ohio State

Ohio State is the university J.D. Vance chose after high school and the institution where he completed an unusually accelerated undergraduate education. His account presents it not only as a place of study but as a threshold: before he could imagine navigating college, he and Mamaw struggled to understand the financial-aid system; after military service, he arrived better prepared, embraced the independence of campus life, and graduated in less than two years. The university’s role in his trajectory is clearest in the contrast between those two encounters with its demands.

Choosing the University

With friends preparing for college, J.D. Vance decided to do the same. His earlier poor grades threatened to narrow his options, but a strong SAT score made it possible for him to seek admission to either of the two schools that interested him, Ohio State and Miami University. Several months before graduating from high school, he had settled on Ohio State, though he later acknowledged that he had given the decision little thought. The university then sent a substantial packet of financial-aid information, turning the abstract plan to attend college into a set of practical questions.

The packet described Pell Grants, subsidized and unsubsidized loans, scholarships, and work-study. J.D. Vance and Mamaw spent hours trying to understand what the terms meant. Their calculation that college debt might be enough to buy a decent home in Middletown captures how unfamiliar the scale and structure of higher education financing were to them. They had not yet begun filling out the forms; completing them seemed to require a separate, formidable effort. In retrospect, that episode marked a real barrier to entry: admission and aid were not self-explanatory opportunities but a paperwork system that the pair had to decipher without confidence that they understood its rules.

A Different Readiness for College

J.D. Vance later connected his decision to join the Marine Corps with his lack of readiness for adult responsibilities. At the time, he did not know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete college financial-aid forms. After his service, he described a changed position: he knew what he wanted from his life and how to pursue it, and he was due to begin classes at Ohio State in three weeks. The university therefore represented a second attempt at a transition that had once felt daunting, now approached with clearer purpose.

He arrived for orientation in early September 2007, excited by the prospect of starting. The day’s details remained vivid in his recollection: lunch at Chipotle, where Lindsay tried the restaurant for the first time; a walk from the orientation building to the south-campus house that would become his home in Columbus; and a meeting with a guidance counselor who helped arrange his first schedule. He was assigned classes on four days each week, none beginning before 9:30 in the morning. After the Marine Corps’ 5:30 a.m. wake-ups, that timetable felt like a strikingly generous change of pace.

Campus and Life in Columbus

Ohio State’s main campus in Columbus was about one hundred miles from Middletown. That distance let J.D. Vance visit family on weekends, while giving him a new urban setting for daily life. He contrasted Columbus with Havelock, the North Carolina city closest to his Marine Corps base, which seemed more like Middletown. Columbus, by comparison, felt to him like an urban paradise. He described a fast-growing city whose expansion was tied in large part to the university: graduates were starting businesses, historic buildings were being converted into restaurants and bars, and even the city’s worst neighborhoods appeared to be undergoing revitalization.

The social life around the university also helped make the city accessible. Not long after J.D. Vance moved there, one of his best friends became a local radio station’s promotions director, giving him a regular sense of what was happening around town. The account places campus within a wider environment of changing businesses, neighborhoods, and entertainment, rather than treating college as an experience confined to classrooms. At the same time, the proximity to Middletown meant that the move did not require severing family ties: the university city and his family home remained close enough for weekend visits.

Academic Reversal and Graduation

By the time he began at Ohio State, the Marine Corps had given J.D. Vance a strong sense of invincibility. He went to class, completed homework, studied at the library, and still returned home in time to drink late with friends before getting up early to run. He regarded the schedule as intense, but the independent college life that had frightened him at eighteen now seemed manageable. That change was especially notable against his high-school record: he recalled having nearly failed out, with Ds and Fs in English I. At Ohio State, he was able to sustain a demanding routine and turn his studies into a marked academic success.

After one year and eleven months at the university, he graduated in August 2009 with a double major and summa cum laude honors. His family insisted that he attend the ceremony even though he had tried to skip it. He sat through three hours in an uncomfortable chair before going to the podium. When Gordon Gee, then president of Ohio State University, paused for an unusually long photograph with the graduate ahead of him, J.D. Vance asked Gee’s assistant for the diploma without speaking. She handed it to him, and he stepped behind Gee and down from the podium without shaking the president’s hand. The small, practical gesture suited his impatience with ceremony: he had come for the credential and was ready to move on to what followed.

Trust, Limits, and the Next Step

Ohio State’s professors mattered to J.D. Vance not just as instructors but as people whose judgment he trusted. When considering a later application to Stanford Law School, he could not bring himself to ask the dean of his college to write a recommendation. He had never met her or taken one of her classes, and, despite his affection for Ohio State and the education it had given him, he experienced her as an outsider. By contrast, the professors he selected for recommendations had taught him, tested him, and read his work; their authority came from an established relationship.

He tried to overcome his hesitation, printed the form, and drove it to campus, but ultimately crumpled it up and threw it away. There would be no Stanford Law application. This decision shows a limit to the institutional confidence his undergraduate success had produced: academic achievement did not automatically make an unfamiliar authority feel trustworthy. Ohio State had provided an education and an experience he valued, yet personal trust remained central to how he made consequential choices. The university’s place in his story thus extends from the early struggle to decode its aid forms through graduation and into the later decisions shaped by the relationships he formed there.