Majoring in success: Indiana colleges come up with innovative brain-drain plugs.

• Author: Beck, Bill
• Position: Education

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF Evansville, the Career Services department pairs students with alumni in a job-shadowing project. Grace College in Winona Lake has created an Orthopedic Scholar Institute to help local students find internships with the region's biggest employers. The University of Indianapolis is identifying emerging careers in an attempt to better prepare students for the Hoosier work force of tomorrow.

They're examples of the innovative programs funded by the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment to stem the flight of intellectual capital--in this case Indiana college graduates--from the state. The so-called "brain drain," in which the state's best and brightest graduate from a Hoosier college or university and then take a job in Chicago, New York, Atlanta or Silicon Valley, was first identified in the late 1990s.

In a 1999 study, the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute found that nearly four in 10 recent Hoosier college graduates leave the state to find work. The U.S. Census Bureau reported recently that nearly 15,000 more young Hoosier college graduates left the state between 1995 and 2000 than the number who moved to Indiana.

In response, the Lilly Endowment made the brain drain a focus of the foundation's higher-education funding. Rather than impose top-down solutions, however, Lilly Endowment asked the state's colleges and universities to come up with grassroots solutions, offering grants to make the solutions happen. Some of the latest awards came early in 2004, when the endowment announced grants totaling $38.9 million to 36 colleges and universities. The lion's share of the grants were in the $750,000 to $1 million range and are designed to fund three-year projects.

At Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Lilly Endowment money is funding internship opportunities for ISU students, including a summer internship program with Clarian Health Partners, headquartered in Indianapolis. Interns participating in the program receive scholarships. In some cases, the employer matches the scholarship. During its first year, the Center for Public Service and Community Engagement has placed 44 interns, says director Nancy Rogers. In addition, the center's Liberal Learning in Action project hopes to provide support allowing ISU students in traditional liberal-arts programs to get experience in the workplace.

"We'd like to place 65 interns a year through the scholarship program," Rogers says. "And we would expect another 40 to 50 liberal-arts...