From N. Clay Robbins, President, Lilly Endowment Inc.
For the last several years, Lilly Endowment has been deeply concerned about the unacceptably low rankings of Indiana’s residents in several measures of educational attainment: Indiana ranks 48th of the 50 states in the percentage of our adult population with a baccalaureate degree and 50th of the 50 states in the percentage of our workforce in professional positions or specialty occupations. The recent news that Indiana has declined from 42nd to 45th in the SAT college entrance exam scores exacerbates this concern.
If Indiana is to prosper in the highly technological, globally competitive economy of the future, its workforce must be prepared. These statistics show that we have far to go.
Since 1996, the Endowment has invested more than $220 million in efforts by virtually all of Indiana’s four-year public and private colleges and universities to address issues of educational attainment in a variety of ways designed by the institutions themselves. We also have initiated the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship Program, by which more than 350 students from across the state are attending Indiana colleges and universities on full-tuition scholarships.
Now, we believe the time has come to invest in a select number of bold, cutting-edge programs of major significance to complement theses earlier efforts.
Therefore, we are pleased to announce today that the Lilly Endowment Board of Directors has approved two grants totaling nearly $60 million that should give Indiana a boost along the path to preparing itself for the future – a grant of $29.7 million to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology to create a Center for an Innovation Economy (RHCIE) and a grant of $29.9 million to the Indiana University Foundation for the Indiana Pervasive Computing Research (IPCRES) initiative.
The Endowment invited these two institutions to develop proposals to achieve a new level of excellence in areas of strategic importance to the institutions and to our state’s future. In both cases, the proposed activities will build on existing strengths of the institutions. Rose-Hulman recently received a top categorical ranking in the U.S. News & World Report’s "America’s Best Colleges" article and has achieved a deserved national reputation for its excellence in engineering education and its innovative programs in applied research. Indiana University is distinguishing itself as a leader in information technology by forming important collaborations with Microsoft, IBM and Cisco; establishing a new School of Informatics, and securing the Internet2 Network Operations Center.
These grants from the Endowment will allow IU and Rose-Hulman to make quantum leaps in their unique capabilities to educate students, conduct innovative and useful research and foster a critical cluster of expertise that will have an impact on the future of the state. It is axiomatic that these grants and the activities they generate cannot, by themselves, turn the state around. We do hope, however, that these grants will inspire leaders from all sectors to work together to design and implement bold new strategies to enhance Indiana's future competitiveness.