I have always believed that education is the key component towards what will make a community thrive. The value that education can bring to a community is immeasurable, as an area’s schools raise and educate the youth and soon to be working class. In addition, both of my parents are high school teachers, and have instilled in me the importance of a good education at both an individual and a communal level. With that said, I knew when I began my thesis that I wanted to write about education in some way. After discovering that funding allocations for Indiana’s higher education institutions shifted in favor of the state’s two-year institutions, I wanted to see whether that shift had any impact on the type of credentials that those two-year institutions, along with other four-year institutions’ credentials.
While researching articles for my literature review, I came across an article from Ascend Indiana that laid out their current analysis and future predictions of the employment landscape of Indiana. One large, pressing issue I noticed was that additional credential output each year for Indiana colleges and universities will be outpaced by the increase in number of jobs available each year in Indiana. Since I was already researching and analyzing credential data, I felt as though I could apply these findings to my own research as well. I knew my research was never going to be able to fix that large issue. However, I hoped initially that my research could shed some light on that gap moving forward.
After a lengthy literature review that included subjects such as Human Capital Theory and more, I hypothesized that the two-year institutions would have a larger increase proportionally in the amount of credentials they distributed as compared to the four-year institutions from 2012-2019. The two-year institutions I took data from were Vincennes University and Ivy Tech Community College, while the four-year institutions I took data from were Indiana University-Bloomington, Purdue University-West Lafayette, and Ball State University in Muncie, IN. I also had an additional hypothesis that went along with the future landscape of Indiana. The Ascend Indiana report also included the highest demanded job sectors moving forward, with one of them being Computer/Mathematical Occupations. My additional hypothesis was that the two-year institutions, since they are receiving more funding proportionally, would also distribute more of those credentials from 2012-2019.
When I was conducting my data research, I probably spent 10% of that time on funding allocations while spending the rest of that time on my credential data, and understandably so. There were literally thousands of credentials distributed from 2012 to 2019 that needed to be analyzed. Luckily, my advisor directed me to a site that had all of the data in one place, which made things much easier, although the process of dividing up the credentials into four categories (STEM, Professional, Humanities, and Certificates/Trades) was time consuming to say the least. However, I was able to get that done and analyze the resulting data to figure out whether my hypotheses were even remotely right.
Not to my surprise, my main hypothesis turned out to be true. From 2012-2019, the amount of credentials given out by the 3 four-year institutions rose about 11%, while the two-year institutions increased the amount of credentials they distributed by about 75%, nearly seven times as much as the four-year institutions. To visually display this and other data that I felt was important, I created line graphs in excel so that the reader could visually see the changes in credential output from 2012-2019. However, I do not believe that the previously stated finding was the most impactful part of my research.
It turned out that my additional hypothesis was far from correct, in that the amount of computer/mathematical credentials, types of credentials that would tend to feed into computer/mathematical occupations, actually went down from 2012-2019, while the number for four-year institutions rose in that same time period. You can visually see the difference in the graph below.
I felt as though this was a significant issue, because there appears to be a misalignment between the shift in funding allocations and should result from that moving forward. Specifically, I propose at the end of my research that two-year institutions, such as Ivy Tech Community College, need to do a better job at aligning their credentials with the future job demand of Indiana. This should be the case not only due to the shift in funding allocations that favored them, but also because community colleges do a much better job at keeping their graduates within their respective state. Institutions that do not suffer from brain drain should make sure they are aligning their credentials with the future job demand of the state to ensure that the state’s employment landscape is being filled adequately.
Ethan Dillman is a senior at Indiana University.
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