Friday, October 19, 2018

IIT FEATURED IN CRAIN'S ARTICLE


The area's ‘other' tech school seeks to shed its also-ran status
Illinois Institute of Technology has a bold plan to turn the South Side campus into a hub of innovation and tech entrepreneurship.
LYNNE MAREK  



Illinois Institute of Technology President Alan Cramb

University leadership aims to turn the South Side campus into a hub of innovation and technology entrepreneurship. Here's how.

The Illinois Institute of Technology, a Bronzeville university laser-focused on STEM before it was cool, this month opens its first new academic building in nearly 50 years. The debut of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation & Tech Entrepreneurship is a milestone for a changing university in a transforming neighborhood.
Illinois Tech President Alan Cramb's plan to expand student headcount by 1,000, or 15 percent, depends on recruiting more students from outside the state and seeking a higher percentage of undergraduates, as its big population of foreign grad students declines. The new institute should aid that effort as the modernist campus designed by famed former faculty member Ludwig Mies van der Rohe regains luster in a Bronzeville revival.
"We need to grow, and if you look at it, the student population in Illinois is not increasing, so we know over time it's going to decrease," Cramb says. "We made the decision that we should be in the areas that are growing," he says, rattling off state targets for recruitment, including California, Washington, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and East Coast locales.
The Armour Institute opened near Illinois Tech's South Side location in 1893, with $1 million from the wealthy Chicago meatpacking family of the same name and changed its name to Illinois Institute of Technology after the first of multiple mergers over the decades that added the Institute of Design, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Stuart School of Management & Finance (now Stuart School of Business) and Midwest College of Engineering.
Today, the private school's main campus, designed by German-born Mies, sprawls over 120 acres near 33rd and State streets, with locations downtown and in suburban Wheaton and Bedford Park.
Among majors for Illinois Tech undergrads, computer science is most popular, followed by architecture and mechanical engineering. Other studies, including at the graduate level, include life sciences, applied technology, business and law.
The new $37 million Kaplan Institute will give students across the school's disciplines a place to test ideas with an eye to business innovation. It's named for engineer alumnus Ed Kaplan, who co-founded bar-code technology company Zebra Technologies and gave $11 million in 2014 to jump-start funding for the institute.
"Universities want to have these centers of gravity," says Mark Harris, CEO of the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition. Illinois Tech lagged its more prestigious Chicago rivals, Northwestern University and University of Chicago, in creating one, but it's making headway now on infrastructure to support entrepreneurial activity, he says.

The institute this year hired Howard Tullman, former CEO of Chicago tech incubator 1871, as its first executive director. In his former position, Tullman says, he routinely pointed employers seeking a diverse technical talent pool to Illinois Tech. "It was embarrassing that they didn't understand that there was this kind of a resource here," he says. With Chicago now an emerging tech center, he says, "the south of the city is going to explode."
Despite being a showcase for famous architects, including Dutchman Rem Koolhaas and Mies protege Helmut Jahn, the school has kept a low profile 5 miles south of the city's center, with a lot of foreign students in a neighborhood that struggled with 20th-century poverty and crime. As troubles tied to nearby Stateway Gardens and Robert Taylor Homes low-income housing worsened, Illinois Tech considered moving in 1994 but ultimately stayed as plans to demolish the housing projects evolved.
Now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel points to Illinois Tech as one of a number of universities giving the city an unrivaled talent pool, and he echoes Cramb in citing Bronzeville's new development. Recent improvements to the neighborhood include an arts and recreation center in Ellis Park, a new field house in Williams Park, a recently constructed pedestrian bridge to the lakefront and an expanded boat harbor, plus private projects like plans to redevelop the former Michael Reese Hospital property and the arrival of a Mariano's grocery store. "You bring in these fundamentals, then they stabilize and they grow," Emanuel says.
Today, 40 percent of Illinois Tech's 6,705 students come from outside the U.S. and 55 percent are graduate students. Cramb wants to change that mix, partly because he thinks undergraduate students, who form friendships at school, are key alumni. Plus, Trump administration policies hurt overseas appeal. "For the long-term stability of the university, having a larger undergraduate group that becomes your graduates is better support for the university," he says.
Cramb notes Illinois Tech ranks highly on social mobility scales comparing the wealth of entering students to later earnings. Indeed, among schools offering the "best value," U.S. News & World Report ranks Illinois Tech 30th among 145 (noting an annual sticker price of about $47,650, and $28,200 in tuition and fees after aid).
Robert Pritzker, an Illinois Tech alum and the late co-founder of that wealthy clan's Marmon Group conglomerate, joined with Robert Galvin, the late CEO of another significant Chicago company, Motorola, to make an precedented $120 million pledge to the school in 1996.
More recently, Chris Gladwin—who developed Chicago Big Data storage company Cleversafe (sold to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2015) at the school's technology park and hired upward of 50 students—contributed $7.6 million in 2015 to expand its computer science program with more facilities and faculty and development of an endowment.
As an Illinois Tech trustee now (and CEO of Ocient), he supports Cramb's vision for more undergraduate and U.S. students. To boost Illinois Tech's one-third-female student population, he points to the hiring of leaders like Eunice Santos as chair of the computer science department.
With some serious philanthropic backing, Illinois Tech and Bronzeville are taking a new shot at growth.


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