FOLLOWING IN HIS FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS
As a kid, he went to English department parties and helped serve hors d'oeuvres to John Barth, Joseph Heller, Stan Weintraub, and Paul West. It was heady company and left a lasting impression on a young Bill Oldsey.
"Education and publishing were both part of the life I was born into," says Oldsey, executive vice president of McGraw-Hill. " It was my calling from an early age." 
Born in State College, Oldsey grew up firmly entrenched in the University community. His parents met as Penn State students and Oldsey's father—who'd earned his doctorate at Penn State—was a professor in the English department. In 1969, Dr. Bernard Oldsey, who wrote fiction, literary criticism, a textbook, and edited journals, accepted a position at West Chester University and moved the family to suburban Philadelphia. Oldsey maintained strong ties to his home town and looked forward to returning.
"When it was time for college, my parents wanted me to apply to other schools," he recalls, "but I was eager to get back to my friends and Penn State."
Although initially determined to follow in his father's footsteps, Oldsey soon surmised a Ph.D. was not in his future, and he supplemented his major in English with public relations and business classes. Upon graduation, Oldsey found a tough job market for liberal arts majors and his father, noting his son's predilection for sales, suggested he meet some publishers' representatives.
"My father asked if I knew that there were college travelers from the major educational publishing houses who went around and called on professors," he says. "I thought, 'Wow, that sounds like a good fit. I could do that'."
And he did, going to work for Macmillan's college division, calling on colleges and universities around the Philadelphia area for three years. In 1981, he was promoted to the editorial department, moved to New York, and moved steadily up the ranks. He joined John Wiley & Sons in 1990 as editorial director, and then moved to Simon & Schuster in 1994 to accept his first unit president position. This type of movement was typical in the publishing industry, Oldsey explains, especially with the mergers and consolidations in the 1980s and 90s.
In 1996, Simon & Schuster asked Oldsey to consider moving from college and professional publishing to the elementary school division. At first he was hesitant, but after meeting the people he'd be working with and understanding the business challenges, he decided it was a good career move. After running the Simon & Schuster School Group for several years (after it was purchased by Pearson), Oldsey later became Group President for International Publishing for all of Pearson Education, a position that involved two years of world travel.
He left Pearson in 2003 to run McGraw-Hill's School Education Group which includes all its K-12 companies. In the swiftly changing and politically charged educational environment, one of Oldsey's main jobs is staying in close contact with the federal and state Departments of Education and the educational leadership in major states and school districts.
"With 'No Child Left Behind,' there's now a wave of accountability and a heightened focus on assessment," he says. "Educational publishing tries to be true to the idea that the customers and end users are the gatekeepers and they're the ones who advise us on what we should be producing. K-12 publishing is still very much about what goes on in the classrooms and how teachers teach and students learn."
During his last visit to Penn State, Oldsey, who created the Dr. Bernard S. and Ann Re Oldsey Endowment for the Study of American Literature in the College of the Liberal Arts, talked to a group of graduating English majors who were interested in how to get into the publishing industry.
"I was bowled over by the quality of those kids. Every single one was bright, curious, and innovative in their approach to work and the future," he pauses. "It might sound schmaltzy, but those students made me proud to be a part of Penn State."