Purdue Helps Students Get “World-class” Degrees Near Home

It’s almost graduation time for college students across Indiana. Some of the least heralded gems are those mined right in our local communities, thanks to the Purdue College of Technology Statewide, with 10 locations across Indiana. Students stay home, continue their careers and get a world-class degree they can put to work right in their hometown.

In South Bend, 46 Purdue students will earn their bachelor’s on May 14. Class responder Curtis Damon, a major in industrial technology, paired his classes with a job as associate project engineer for PEI-Genesis in South Bend. And he plans to stay there.

"The College of Technology trains local professionals and young adults on new advanced topics in engineering, quality and design," he explains. "I have personally witnessed many individuals who are not looking for a particular degree but are taking classes for advancement at work and/or for a direct improvement at the workplace they are currently at. The classes in lean manufacturing and production, Six Sigma and inventory management are very straightforward and make it easy to take what you learn and implement it directly into your workplace.

"The College of Technology also allows individuals to stay at home, advance their education and build careers. This is a great benefit to both students and the local businesses in the area. It allows the local community to hire people who are from the area, who are highly educated and motivated to work. You can’t beat hiring individuals who don’t need relocation packages, know the area where they live and the community around them, and have the knowledge and education to help companies succeed."

You can read more about Curtis here. Statewide Technology is an extension of the College of Technology. Its degree programs follow the same curriculum requirements as the programs on the West Lafayette campus. Classes are taught by Purdue faculty or those approved by academic department heads. More than 1,350 students are enrolled at its sites in Anderson, Columbus, Greensburg, Indianapolis, Kokomo, Lafayette, New Albany, Richmond, South Bend and Vincennes. Of those, 53% attend full time.

Jeanne Norberg is a spokesperson for Purdue University.

Gora: Immersive Learning Spurs Innovation, Collaboration

In her second guest post, Ball State University President Jo Ann Gora offers her insights on the following topic:

  • Tell us something that not enough people know about your college or university that makes it such a special place.

While many Indiana citizens and others around the country know that Ball State is redefining education through immersive learning, they often are unaware of the breadth and intensity of those experiences.

Immersive learning is a more focused and intense form of experiential learning, as interdisciplinary teams of students work with a faculty mentor to provide real-world solutions for real-world problems faced by businesses, nonprofit organizations, and communities across Indiana and literally around the world. These projects hone our students’ skills in innovation and collaboration and help them to turn knowledge into judgment and judgment into action.

In the last two years, more than 5,300 Ball State students from 38 academic departments and all seven of our colleges completed 285 immersive learning projects in 69 Indiana counties. Those students have helped to open an arts industry incubator in Brown County, conducted the annual perch count on Lake Michigan, and developed the I-69 Culinary Trail for nine counties stretching from Indianapolis to the Michigan state line. They have written an 18-week nutrition and wellness curriculum with our partners at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital at St. Vincent and Marsh Supermarkets that is now being used by nearly 250 elementary schools in 60 counties. And they have written a crisis communication protocol for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security that affects every county in our state.

The reach of our immersive learning experiences is tremendous. Two of the students involved in the Culinary Trail project are from China, learning about Hoosier culture (and cuisine) as well as marketing and communication.  And a group of Ball State students, mostly from Indiana, spent 10 weeks in China, just outside Hong Kong, working with one of the leading toy manufacturers in the world on a Six Sigma initiative.  This spring, 40 students from our College of Architecture and Planning are visiting 56 cities in 23 countries and applying these new cultural and architectural perspectives to design projects in their own hometowns.

Bringing bright students together with talented faculty in immersive learning projects creates a unique educational experience, one that defines Ball State.

Tomorrow: Ivy Tech’s Tom Snyder

The Joys of Somerville: Massachusetts Mayor Lauded for Government Reform

If you’ve been following our blog over the past year, you’ll realize we haven’t been too kind to Massachusetts. For evidence of our Commonwealth-bashing, see here and here — and for good measure, you better take a look at this as well. (Sorry, perhaps it’s just our Belichick aversion coming through.) But alas, the day has come to offer praise to the Old Bay State as we feature a column from former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith in Governing, in which he touts the reforms of Somerville, Mass. Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone:

Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone has enacted transformative changes in the management of Somerville, Massachusetts, and has done so by championing the importance of cost and efficiency data for all city services to improve accountability and performance. These efforts led to the creation of the SomerStat program. His approach to reform serves as a particularly timely primer on how to establish new norms for tracking and improving service delivery, giving officials the tools to know where to cut costs, where to keep investing and where there are opportunities for innovation…

SomerStat has now taken Baltimore’s CitiStat program one step further by integrating real-time data into its arsenal. According to Hirsch, this has allowed the city "to intensify its reliance on data for decision making." The mayor’s office requires that all city data be centrally accessible by the SomerStat office. This means that data from more than 50 sources are reported to the SomerStat office, from enterprise-wide and stand-alone systems. In fact, Curtatone subsequently created a major new source of performance data by implementing a centralized 311 constituent center (the first such center in New England) that tracks and issues work orders for every resident request for city services.

The first success to come from SomerStat’s analysis of this data was when it revealed a persistent problem of excessive overtime in the police department. The biggest culprit was that overtime costs were incurred whenever an officer was needed to cover someone who was out sick. Police leadership immediately started working with the mayor’s office and the union to create a solution. By increasing the number of officers assigned to each shift, the police and the mayor were not only able to rein in overtime costs, but were able to improve their community policing efforts by maintaining higher staff levels for each shift. "We’ve reaped one of the first rewards of the SomerStat process," Curtatone said. "This is part of our overall effort to modernize city government, cut waste and improve services."