Tom Snyder is a man on a mission. The newly elected president of the state’s Ivy Tech Community College system has been visiting each campus, and he was in Anderson Thursday.
Meeting with administrators, faculty, staff and students, Snyder laid out some plans for Ivy Tech under his tenure, including overseeing a new $30 million computer upgrade that will connect all of Indiana’s campuses.
Snyder explained that the e-mail, voice mail and other computer functions are different for each campus and that this would give uniformity to the statewide system.
“We need the IT system to be seamless,” he said, adding the community college system grew too fast to accomplish that in the past. The upgrade, which will begin July 1 with financial records, will go statewide in three years.
One of the advantages will be to set Ivy Tech up as a distance learning center, meaning students will be able to earn their degrees via the Internet. Similar colleges, such as the for-profit University of Phoenix, have sophisticated distance learning centers.
Robert Shroyer, an Anderson student at Ivy Tech, likes the idea of the distance learning because it would allow more students into the program. He’s currently enrolled in computer information systems.
Shroyer, who said he’s been in the computer field for 12 years, said he needed to return to Ivy Tech for a degree to enhance promotion possibilities in his job. He never took the SAT or ACT in high school and said he was glad Ivy Tech gave him the chance to go to college.
Marketing was also on Snyder’s mind. The system currently has 110,000 students, and Snyder would like to see that climb. He said there are 40,000 students who either dropped out or failed ISTEP in Indiana. “We want to reach those students.”
The days of getting a job out of high school, as many in Anderson did in General Motors’ heyday, are over, he noted. Dropping out or failing, Snyder said, means those students are behind in an economy that demands more training for workers. Nestlé, he said, requires certification in some areas, such as Microsoft, and Ivy Tech can fill the bill.
“We want to encourage people to get a degree, and we want to do it better than anyone else,” said Snyder.
----
Ivy Tech by the numbers
Statewide budget: $269 million
Indiana students: 110,000
Anderson students: 2,000
Certificates in various disciplines given out in 2006: 14,000
Anderson registered nurse applicants: 240
Anderson registered nurse applicants accepted: 60
Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.