Published: September 26, 2008 11:29 pm      

Ivy Tech aims to fulfill multiple missions

Colleges and universities throughout the United States are about creating productive citizens who sustain and increase America’s innovative, intellectual and economic influence within the United States and throughout the world.

Ivy Tech Community College is no different, yet very different at the same time. The college is challenged to provide the state of Indiana with a highly skilled workforce as well as a well-educated student who will transfer to a four-year university, to provide customized industry training and to provide developmental/remedial course work, continuing education and nationally and internationally recognized certifications.

Colleges and universities are also about tradition. Ivy Tech Community College, being a very young college, has without exception developed its tradition as accepting challenges and providing positive results and demonstrating flexibility as legislation changed Ivy Tech’s mission from a vocational to a technical and then to a comprehensive community college.

Logansport Ivy Tech campus is part of the Region 5 state structure that also includes campuses at Kokomo, Wabash and Peru and outreach offices in Rochester and Winamac. The region has more than doubled its number of faculty, degree programs, community partners, transfer courses and programs, enrollment, instructional space and scholarships since 2000. It also has substantially increased alumni and philanthropic giving to the region.

From 2000 to 2008, Logansport enrollment increased over 80 percent, and student enrollment rose from below 500 to more than 900 students.

For Logansport, this tremendous growth and community support equates to a bright future. In the past eight years, full-time faculties have been added to the campus for early childhood education, practical nursing, composition, office administration, medical assisting, mathematics, associate of nursing, criminal justice and business administration.

In 2002, the Logansport campus housed three full-time professors; today Logansport Ivy Tech houses 12.

Region 5, including the Logansport campus, offers students an affordable, quality education with courses and degrees that transfer to all state-supported and most private colleges and universities. In fact, this is an opportunity that many Indiana residents are unaware of. Add to this, dual enrollment opportunities, fast track to college programming, community partnerships and outreach, liberal arts degrees, college for working adults programs, continuing education, remediation and academic skills programs, and a new associate degree in agriculture transferable to Purdue, elementary and secondary education degrees transferable to Indiana University Kokomo, and 300 nursing students preparing at our Region 5 sites: 200 in Kokomo, 80 in Logansport and 20 in Wabash.

With that said, Logansport has in its future what has been called by others “the crown jewel” of the community … that being a new, 81,000-square-foot campus under construction near 18th Street and U.S. 24/35. But that is another story yet to be told.

Dan Hockney is vice chancellor/dean of Ivy Tech Community College in Logansport.