Graduating Home-Grown Talent for the Indiana Workforce

Early results on IU Indianapolis’s Seamless Admissions Initiative offered to IPS high schools are encouraging. According to our official census earlier this week, 81 students from IPS high schools started their undergraduate journey at IU Indy this fall compared to 44 last year. Not all of this can be attributed to our new initiative of course. At the same time, our conversations with members of the K-12 community in Indianapolis suggest that this initiative can be carefully expanded.

Currently the initiative is offered to graduating seniors at the following high schools:

• Crispus Attucks High School
• Shortridge High School
• George Washington High School
• Arsenal Tech High School
• Christel House Watanabe High School
• Heron High School
• Herron-Riverside High School
• Hope Academy High School
• KIPP Indy Legacy High School
• Phalen Virtual Academy
• Purdue Polytechnic High School
• Purdue Polytechnic High School at Broad Ripple

As we learn from the first-year experience of these students, we are in conversations with more than 10 other schools in the city that have indicated a desire to participate.

In Reinventing Boston (2003), Ed Glaeser notes that population growth and the level of education are some of the best predictors of economic growth. Specifically, the proportion of college graduates matters for economic prosperity—and not just for prosperity today but also for the future. In Boston, for instance, the educated workforce mattered as the city evolved from being a port to a center for global shipping to an industrial city in the late 1800s to the city we know today boasting a highly educated workforce dominated by finance, healthcare, professional services, and education. One of the most valuable skills that a college education confers is the ability to learn, and more importantly, to learn how to learn. Thanks to a college education, we can be inventors, but we can also reinvent ourselves to meet the challenges of a changing workforce and world. This is clearly borne out in Boston’s story.

Working together with K-12 leaders, industry partners, and policy makers, we will build the kind of workforce that Indiana deserves—a workforce that has the ability to support a diversified industry structure and the capacity for people to upskill when things change.

Go Jags!

Latha Ramchand
Chancellor