Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute Aims to Educate a
More Valuable and Employable Workforce
Howard Tullman,
university professor and executive director of The Ed Kaplan Family Institute
for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
During my time leading 1871, Chicago’s
largest tech hub, which was recently named the Number 1 university-affiliated
incubator in the world, I found myself constantly having conversations with business
owners who were yearning for more diverse technical talent equipped with the
skills necessary for tomorrow’s jobs. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. With dozens
of major corporate headquarters, countless startups, tech giants like Google,
Salesforce, Facebook expanding major operations in the city, Chicago has become
a world-class tech ecosystem and a center for the development of new and disruptive
technologies, human-centered designs, and multi-disciplinary innovation.
Few other cities across the country have
combined industry, education and technology into civic initiatives, training
programs and attractive and lucrative investment environments as successfully as
Chicago which has particularly exploited and capitalized on its wealth of
colleges and universities. In fact, only Boston has more institutions of higher
learning than Chicago and only a fraction of those are as directly engaged as
we see in Chicago in the kinds of new talent development programs which have
been spawned here.
But it’s still worth asking whether the
city’s pool of technical talent is keeping up with the rapid growth in the
overall demand. And are we developing the “new collar” skills in our students that
they will need to be successful in the globally-competitive employment marketplaces
of the future? Finally, are our colleges
and universities doing enough to ensure that those students who do graduate and
enter the workforce are ready to hit the ground running and make an immediate
impact? In today’s competitive hiring environments, even with the growing needs,
you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.
Recent surveys suggest that the
students themselves aren’t quite convinced that we’re doing the work necessary
to properly prepare them. A 2017
poll released by Gallup and Strada Education Network showed that
only a third of student participants believed they would graduate with the
skills and knowledge to be successful in the job market/workplace (34%-36%) while
just half (53%) believe their major will lead to a good job.
Given the enormous value of and clear
requirement for critical thinkers and problem solvers in business today, any
college or university which isn’t stepping up to the challenge of educating
students in new ways as well as radically re-envisioning their old
methodologies is falling behind. Gone are the days when classroom-style
lectures and rote textbook learning were enough. Many higher education
institutions are putting every student through some type of innovation and
entrepreneurship course, regardless of their departmental majors, in order to
try to graduate highly qualified and instantly employable students.
But far too many of these attempts
lack serious and practical content, strong scholarship and applied wisdom, and,
above all, experienced and interactive instructors who have been practitioners
as well as educators throughout their own careers. They are “me-too” efforts
driven more by a desire for the schools to check the appropriate boxes and
satisfy their various constituencies than by a substantial commitment to real
change and improvement backed by concrete actions.
On the other hand, when institutions
do make a long-term investment in their students’ futures, rather than mere lip
service, the differences are readily apparent. The Illinois Institute of
Technology, located just 10 minutes south of Chicago’s Loop on the Red Line, is
a solid part of the new leadership in this area and we’ve put a giant stake in
the ground with the recent opening of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for
Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship.
At the Kaplan Institute, we’re focused
on turning out graduates who are well-suited for jobs that haven’t been
invented yet; well-trained to use technologies that we’re inventing in order to
address challenges which we are just learning are going to be problems.
How are we accomplishing this?
Among other things, the Kaplan
Institute will serve as the new home for our InterProfessional Projects Program
(IPRO) where multi-disciplinary teams (a chemical engineer, an architect, a business
major or two and more) will work together to solve social, technical or
business problems. Unique to Illinois Tech for decades, every student on campus
spends two semesters taking IPRO classes, regardless of their major. Through
IPRO, students are tackling issues like agriculture in an urban environment by
applying robotics to vertical farming; using data to improve first responder
responsiveness; generating interfaces that bridge the foreign language gap and
improves trust and communication between families and the Chicago Public
Schools; and more.
And, because the Kaplan Institute
provides a new 72,000 sq. ft. campus home for these classes, the instruction,
interaction and innovations no longer take place in the traditional silos –
standard classrooms with desks and walls and barriers – or exclusively in a
single school at the university. The only way to solve the cross-disciplinary
problems of the future which cross every kind of boundary, schools like IIT
need to invest in and build new physical environments like the Kaplan Institute.
Its sheer size will allow the
university to have all the IPRO classes held in a single, centrally-located,
collaborative space. Hundreds of student teams, focused on dynamic
problem-solving projects, will have the unfettered opportunity to work
together, learn from each other, and share resources and ideas. Students will
literally collide with each other in ways that enhance learning, problem
solving and teamwork.
Less focused than others on
“start-ups” and business plan competitions, we take a hands-on approach to
problem-solving with active projects, collaborations, and actual commercial outcomes
and products. Working on these projects with corporate partners and industry
sponsors, provides unique experiences and exposes our students to a broad pool
of future employers across every sector which sets them up for
successful opportunities when they graduate.