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.