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Ivy Tech Community College is a diverse and complex institution, and its success is essential to broaden the opportunities for success across the state.
As current President Sue Ellspermann retires in June, trustees should look beyond the ivory tower for her replacement to build off the momentum of her tenure.
Under Ellspermann’s leadership, Ivy Tech has grown to serve 189,000 students and has about 3,200 instructional staff across its 19 campuses. Within the goal of the school’s current strategy, annual student completions have increased 119%, to 46,000, directionally toward the vision of “50,000 high-quality credentials each year aligned with the needs of Indiana’s workforce and communities.”
In times of transition, it’s essential to revisit an organization’s “why” for existence—pulling from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why.” Organizations that prove durable over time regularly revisit their founding purpose and integrate that into the who, the how and the what of daily operations.
Ivy Tech was formed in 1963 as Indiana Vocational Technical College and has evolved to become the largest community college in the country. This foundation of vocational and technical training represents the “why” of Ivy Tech.
What the next president will inherit is continued opportunities to improve enrollment, student retention and, most important, the job-alignment and job-readiness of students.
Only 61.4% of recent Indiana high school graduates enrolled in college, down from pre-pandemic numbers of 66.2%. Dual enrollment, which allows high school students to take classes at Ivy Tech, is growing and could help overall enrollment numbers.
But once students enroll, keeping them proves challenging, with a retention rate of around 51%, according to College Factual. This isn’t unique to Ivy Tech, with national community college retention hovering around 55%. Movement on this metric won’t be easy to accomplish, but continued “use of data to support students,” which is called for in the strategy, is essential.
Beyond internal challenges, AI, automation and continued technology advancements are disrupting the classroom, the curriculum and the potential jobs awaiting students upon certification or graduation.
These disruptions will require an adaptive leader, experienced in quickly navigating market forces.
From the employer perspective, we in the HVAC industry are in constant need of new technicians. An ongoing challenge is to find work-ready graduates. The speed of technology changes can mean graduates haven’t been working on the newest equipment and refrigerant, putting them at a disadvantage. This gap between curriculum focus and job expectations is not a new problem, but it has become more acute with the disruptions from new technology across industries.
Ivy Tech, to its credit, has made efforts to bridge the gap by building corporate partnerships. A recent example at Ivy Tech Lake County is a new partnership with Israeli-based technology firm CyberProAI “to help students in its cybersecurity program train with dynamic interactive software, exercises, labs and military-grade cyber-attack simulators,” according to The Times of Northwest Indiana.
With the size and distributed structure of the community network, the role also demands someone with an approach to leading who delegates and trusts. The concept of subsidiarity from the Catholic Church jumps to mind, which is defined as “a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.”
Finding a president who cares deeply about the students being served, understands the demands of the marketplace, and builds trust in local leaders is a difficult and important task, and I hope trustees are bold in their decision.•
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Schutt is co-founder of Homesense Heating & Cooling and Refinery46 and an American Enterprise Institute civic renewal fellow. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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