Kathy Oren
The Community Education Coalition (CEC) will receive nearly a half-million dollars as part of a statewide initiative to provide Hoosier students with resources to make informed decisions about their college and career paths.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education selected 28 organizations for career coaching grants, which aim to align Indiana’s career coaching and navigation system based on a common framework recently put together by the state.
The Indiana General Assembly appropriated $25 million to fund the grants during the 2023 legislative session. CEC is getting $492,303 to go towards funding pilot programs within CEC’s TuFuturo and Black and Black-Biracial initiatives through 2025 with a particular focus on low-income students, coalition officials said.
“The funding means that we can really invest the time, invest some resources in collaborating with partners on something that’s very important to our economy and very important to our students — and that’s making sure students get the best information around college, around careers so that they can make good choices,” CEC President and CEO Kathy Oren said.
The state identified groups already doing high school career coaching for the grants and specified that awarded grantees partner with at least one school system and start implementing a career coaching and navigation framework created by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. Superintendent Chad Phillips said the support from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education will greatly enhance BCSC’s ability to provide personalized career guidance to students.
“Our school counselors strive to meet the needs of every student and this collaboration with CEC will strengthen our individualized approach to helping students achieve their educational and career goals, preparing them for a bright future,” he said.
Cindy Frey, president of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, said the grant will benefit not only students but also the local economy. “By preparing our youth for high-demand careers, we ensure a robust talent pipeline that meets the needs of our regional employers.”
The framework of the grant provides different milestones related to areas including financial literacy, career exploration and post secondary planning that students should reach at different grade-levels to ensure they’re keeping up with preparation for life after high school, whatever form that may take. For example, in the area of post secondary planning, by eighth grade students are asked to have created their ScholarTrack account, a state resource for financial aid information.
Oren observed that locally “there is already a lot of good work happening around college and career coaching by a lot of different partners” and they intend to work with those local partners through a stakeholder engagement process to figure out the best ways to implement the framework.
“We’ll be pulling folks together from BCSC, employers, guidance counselors, iGrad, as well as probably our AirPark institutions, Ivy Tech, IU — create a guiding team of the key stakeholders that care about this,” Oren said. ” … How can we leverage the state’s career coaching and navigation framework to really take what’s already happening to the next level in a way that’s aligned with this model that the state wants to see across the state?”
CEC plans to have the guiding team put together in the next month.
Ten years ago between 65 and 69 percent of high school students in Bartholomew County went on to college within two years of high school graduation, according to Oren. Today, that number has dropped to 53 percent — a microcosm of a national issue accentuated by the pandemic.
College enrollment still remains well below pre-pandemic levels despite recent small increases, data shows. National Student Clearinghouse found spring 2024 enrollment consists of nearly 800,000 fewer students compared to spring 2020.
Some of the more prominent challenges students in Bartholomew County have in determining what to do after high school are barriers related to finances, language or those that come as a result of being the first person in a family to pursue higher education, Oren said.
“We’re really thinking about all those barriers as we roll this out and think about how can we reach the right students? Which is why we’re going to start with TuFuturo and really use that group as a pilot, and then determine, ‘Here’s something we can replicate,’” Oren said. “What does that look like if we adapt this for Black and Black-Biracial youth? Or iGrad students? We want all students eventually to have access to this content.”
Director of Strategy & Development Veronica Franzese added that after the stakeholder engagement process, they plan to compile a road map documenting their college and career coaching methodology so it can be used by others.
