A Letter From the President

Dear graduates and friends of Rose Hulman,

Francois Jacob, the French physiologist who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in medicine, claimed that “Without expectations, there is no future, only an endless present”.  Jacob believed that expectation  --  an appreciation of  future potential and possibility – is the fundamental quality that defines us as human beings.   As we begin our conversation about Rose-Hulman’s future, we hope to engage your sense of potential and possibility.  In the months ahead, I look forward to sharing your expectations as part of  “Vision 2015: A Conversation About Rose-Hulman’s Future.”   

We have a lot to talk about!  Our institute has never had a brighter future, because the demand for well-educated bachelor’s-level engineers and scientists will accelerate in the decades ahead.  As you develop your expectations about Rose-Hulman’s future, please take some time to reflect on four important and rapidly-changing aspects of our environment.

• Evolving higher education in Indiana.   Fiscal constraints have forced a rethinking of how our state’s higher education resources are focused and financed. In the years ahead, we can expect that Purdue and Indiana University will evolve toward a more research-oriented mission, with less access for marginally-qualified undergraduates.  As Purdue implements this strategy, the Purdue faculty will be better equipped to  recruit and retain top engineering and science students – exactly the students most interesting to Rose-Hulman. We need to think carefully about how we will adapt to a Purdue engineering program increasingly focused on outstanding students, and  offered at much lower cost than a Rose-Hulman education.

• Increasing capabilities in overseas engineering colleges. When we convened Commission on the Future in 1991, there was no question that US undergraduate engineering and science education was without peer. As we begin thinking about Rose-Hulman Vision 2015, shifts in the global education base have become apparent.  Intel’s founder Andy Grove recently said that “Any engineering, scientific or management task that can be performed in the US can now be performed in Asia.”  Recent visitors to our campus from Korea and India confirm by their personal example the commitment and quality of engineering educators in Asia. How will our future reflect this changing reality, in the relationships that our Institute builds and the experiences that we provide for our students ?

• Shifting student demographics.   By 2015 we can expect that the high school students we attract as Rose-Hulman freshmen will be drawn from a very different population.  The class that will enter in 2015 is already in elementary school.  When these young people graduate from high school, nearly 10% of the Indiana graduates will be Hispanic (where fewer than 2% are today).  What will this mean for Rose-Hulman ?
  We will also be seeing relatively fewer Midwest high school prospects in 2015.  In the next ten years, the population of high school graduates in the Southern states will increase almost 20% and in the Western states by more than 15%.  But the Midwest high school graduate population will rise by less than 3%.  More of our prospective students will be farther from Terre Haute than they are today. How will we attract them ?
  Perhaps most important, nearly half the nation’s high school graduates entering college in 2015 will come from families whose total annual income is less than the annual cost of sending one student to Rose-Hulman.  How will be certain that the students best able to benefit from a Rose-Hulman education will receive one?

• Interdisciplinary knowledge.  Among the most striking shifts in the world of engineering practice is the demand for engineers at every level to work productively in multidisciplinary and multicultural environments.  Today, Rose-Hulman graduates are already at work in consumer products companies designing packaging using computational fluid dynamics modeling borrowed from nuclear weapons simulators. Other graduates are engineers in food processing equipment companies building complex machines driven by robots using machine vision and sophisticated software.  The days of the single specialty are gone; our most successful future graduates will be able to range productively across disciplines and cultures, adding value to the efforts of more narrowly-focused professionals.  These graduates will need continuing development throughout their professional lifetimes to remain leaders in their organizations. How will we prepare our graduates of 2015 for careers that will extend past mid-century ?

Our conversation about the future of Rose-Hulman will surely be a rich and varied one, and I look forward to the insights and new opportunities that will emerge as we share our expectations.  Francois Jacob did his Nobel prize-winning work at the Pasteur Institute, which was founded 80 years earlier to solve the problem of rabies. His insights on bacterial genetics could not have been imagined by the scientists who founded his institute.  Let’s see what future potentials and possibilities develop from our conversation in the months and years ahead!

All good wishes

Jack