Five Questions with Ivy Tech interim chancellor Ethan Heicher

Jun. 3—Ivy Tech Community college has positioned itself to be a critical resource when it comes to building Indiana's workforce of tomorrow.

Ethan Heicher was recently tasked to help lead the college as the interim chancellor of the Kokomo Service Area, which includes Cass, Fulton, Howard, Miami, Pulaski and Tipton counties.

Heicher, who began his career at Ivy Tech in 2009 as a professor of English and chair of the Humanities program at Kokomo, has been instrumental in helping the college grow. He has helped bring new programs to the school such as the Integrated Technology Education Pathways (ITEP), which helps high school students develop industry skills and credentials.

He also helped grow dual enrollment opportunities for high school students and played a large role in the Kokomo Campus transformation, which brought high-tech classrooms to the school that also serve as labs.

For instance, nursing students can step through a door in their classroom and immediately be in an area that looks and feels like a hospital corridor. There is a locker room, places to prep for surgery and beds with simulated patients waiting for help.

"People tend to think of education as these little compartments, semesters of work, classes," Heicher said. "Our biggest job these days is redefining education as a process that doesn't even start with us. It starts with our K-12 partners and the work that we do with them through dual credit and dual enrollment and our college and career connection coaches. And it extends far beyond us to employers and the work that we do with those partners."

Interim Chancellor Heicher recently sat down with the Pharos-Tribune to talk about how Ivy Tech Community College can prepare students for the jobs of the future and why the college is a good choice for students preparing to graduate from high school.

With the recent announcement of the new Stellantis electric vehicle (EV) battery plant, how can Ivy Tech help prepare the local workforce for the new jobs the plant will bring to the region?

It's about building on the relationship we have already built with Stellantis for more than 20 years. We have a relationship that stretches back: lots of programming, workforce training. We have ITEP that involves Stellantis in a big way. They hosted well over 100 work-based learning experiences for students in that program. They were involved with interactions with hundreds of students who were dual credit students at the high school level. In the run up to our current apprenticeship relationship with Stellantis, we were involved with putting together pre-apprenticeship programming on the workforce training side, and everyone rose to the occasion for that. Our partnership goes back a long way and is very strong. I think that was part of the reason why Kokomo was chosen as a location. There will be employees who need skilled trades training in that new facility. There will be a lot of automation and robotics that will be in that new facility. Our new Smart Manufacturing and Digital Integration Program, that is the new face of advanced manufacturing. And all of the new technologies that are going to be installed in that new EV battery facility will connect to that in some way. So in a lot of ways we have already lined up our academic pathways to meet those needs. There may be some workforce training or for-credit credential base outcome training and education that we need to do specifically around EV battery production. But we have a really solid foundation to build on already.

What are the jobs of the future in the Ivy Tech Kokomo service area and how is the college meeting the needs of their students and the community to fill these positions?

We do an annual review of job growth and program needs within our community. We are constantly evaluating that from a quantitative side. We have advisory boards. We have our campus board of trustees. We have a lot of connections to community partners who give us a birds eye view of the direction that these economic sectors are heading in the near future and in the long-term future. The big economic sectors that we know: healthcare, advanced manufacturing, education is a huge need — both early childhood and primary and secondary education. Agriculture still remains a big economic sector for our six county service area. And then we know that IT spaces like cyber security and software development, information technology support — those IT sectors are just going to keep growing and growing and growing.

When I say healthcare, that's all over the place. We will be adding a new cohort in our nursing program at our Logansport site next summer. And that's about rising to the occasion and meeting community needs. We've got medical assisting needs in Logansport and Kokomo, Peru. We've got CNA needs. We've got paramedic science and surgical technology needs across the spectrum of healthcare careers. We are trying to be as involved in helping those community needs as possible.

What are the advantages of attending Ivy Tech compared to a four year university?

One doesn't preclude the other. About half of our students go on to a four year institution directly from Ivy Tech. IUK is our biggest transfer partner. We love the relationship we have with them. I do think we offer some unique qualities that would appeal to a large swathe of students. We specialize in those first two year of college. It's about understanding the student population that is coming to us, their needs in those first two years. We engage with a lot of first generation college students. We engage with a lot of students who are kind of on the cusp of 'do I go on to higher education or not?' Those types of students are really important. We do a lot of short-term credential outcomes in education and training on this campus. Half of our students don't immediately go on to a four year institution. They are looking for a career. They are wanting an outcome that will get them into the workforce as quickly as possible and we are able to offer certificates in the space of a semester. We are able to offer technical certificates over the course of an academic year. An associate degree is over a two year period or with our ASAP program over eleven months. That gets students an outcome that they can put on their resume. Often times, those have nationally-recognized certifications within them and that's another recognition that employers are looking for. We can get them out to the career they want to build. All of those are stackable. When they want to build on those further down the road they are able to come back to us and do that work as well.

Ivy Tech puts a lot of effort into giving students hands-on opportunities to practice classroom learning, whether through the high-tech labs inside the university or through community partnerships. Why is it so important for students to have these opportunities, especially when it comes to working with the community?

It's good education practice to involve application with theory. If a student can take something they've learned — an idea, a skillset, a knowledge base that they accrued — and immediately apply it in a lab, we know it will stay with them longer and they will begin to see the why of the theory. In our campus redesign at the Kokomo campus and at our campus in Logansport, we've made that lecture lab space more fluid. Years ago you had a lecture on one day and a lab on another. That is no longer the case. Now students float back and forth between those spaces and are able to learn something, apply it and come back to discuss it, build on it and then go back into the lab and apply it again. The biggest scale up of the application of your knowledge is in the workplace. You get to add that extra bit of layer of culture to those skills. What does that workplace feel like, is it a good connection for the student? Getting them involved in clinicals, practicums, internships early in their education experience exposes them to the outcome they are working towards. They can understand whether they need to shift directions or run to that goal as quickly as they can. We've seen our student success rates rise as a result of involving employers in the educational experience. Retention is just so much better. Student success is what we are aiming for. Getting students involved in hands-on applications is a big, big part of that.

Ivy Tech invests a lot into each student. In what ways does the college put extra effort into helping students obtain their degrees, and why is that so important to the school?

Seeing student success is why every single person has come to work for Ivy Tech. That is everyone's goal, for students to be as successful as they can possibly be and to make sure that any barriers that get in their way — on campus or off campus — we've at least made as much effort as possible to make sure that those barriers are cleared out and that students have a direct line toward their goals and what they see as success. Breaking down those financial barriers is super important. Once we get the students on campus, the wraparound services become a real focus. We have a mental health counselor on our campus. We have a giving shelf on our campus. We have a director of student success on our campus who does connect students to those services to meet the needs that they might have, to overcome those hurdles, whether that is short-term transportation, whether that is access to daycare through vouchers, whether that's referral to a community partner who might assist with that student overcoming whatever barrier that might be. We have on-campus career coaches who prepare students for interviews, help them work on their resumes, get them connected to job shadowing experiences. There is just so much here. We do everything that we can to make sure that our students are as successful as possible, and everyone on campus is involved in that work. That is the nature of the work that we do.