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It has been a week worth celebrating, as 40 venture capitalists from 12 states came to meet the area’s most promising young technology entrepreneurs and hear proposals for investment.
This fourth version of TechPoint’s networking event drew a growing crowd of VCs, almost a third of them new participants.
Recent reports on Indiana as a center for tech launches suggest genuine progress. A Bloomberg evaluation of tech deals in metro areas in 2017 labeled Indianapolis as one of two interesting new players (the other was Columbus). We hardly stand alongside San Francisco or Boston, but having broken into the top 20, we’re in good company, with cities like Denver and Atlanta.
Most every piece on strategies by which a city or a state can succeed in the highly technological 21st century economy includes one approach that the Holcomb/Crouch administration is pursuing: expanding opportunities for the workforce to make a difference in technology, biotechnology, robotics and a host of others.
The last few weeks have demonstrated the power of education in creating opportunity. Roche Diagnostics, the University of Indianapolis and Ascend Indiana announced creation of the “Roche Academy” at the university. The object is to prepare biology and chemistry students for the technical challenges presented by biomedical equipment in hospitals and laboratories. Graduates will be offered a position at Roche, as well as other financial and educational incentives.
Such opportunities can go well beyond traditional academics. Faced with a continuing demand for pilots, Republic Airways has just opened its Leadership in Flight Training program. Six hundred applicants knocked on that door, attracted no doubt by the promise of a position with Republic if they graduate.
As with projects involving Salesforce and Infosys, our city and state governments have offered incentive support.
As these practical efforts were underway by public and private leaders in Indiana, New York University set off a debate by announcing that its medical school students would no longer pay tuition. The university said it had already raised from private donors more than $450 million of the $600 million it will need to make this work.
The school’s dean cited the large amounts of money medical students borrow and called reducing debt by eliminating tuition “a moral imperative.” He said NYU hoped other schools would follow.
There’s some evidence that could occur. Last year, the University of Hawaii announced a mega-gift that it hopes eventually will make the college tuition-free. And, of course, most campaign speeches by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren feature similar themes. The 44 million Americans who carry $1.4 trillion in student debt certainly feel the pain.
Still, it’s not clear that dedicating enormous sums of public or private money to abolish tuition at public institutions is the best choice, even in medicine. As Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and researcher at Indiana University, said of the NYU project: “If you had to find some cause to put tons of money behind, this strikes me as an odd one.”
Why might that be? I’ll mention just two. One is that free tuition confers benefits on both the impoverished and the 1 percent without any distinction. Even at NYU, some 38 percent of the medical school graduates walk out the door with no debt at all.
Second, making public colleges free would represent a serious threat to private education. A small number of well-endowed privates could probably survive, but making all the publics free would shutter a record number of small private colleges.
The current initiatives of Indiana’s public and private leadership seem altogether more likely to succeed. And, yes, they do cost money. As we begin to build a new state budget, we must keep our eyes on the value of K-12 and higher education.•
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Shepard, formerly Indiana chief justice, now serves as senior judge and teaches law. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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