In Trump Country, College Is a Leaky Lifeboat

As snow whips through the downtown one evening, the historic Indiana Theatre sits dark. The venue once attracted stars like Frank Sinatra but has since faded from national attention. For a few hours last May, however, that all changed. Some 2,000 people descended on the theater, lining up in the early-morning hours to meet the man they felt could fix their problems: Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Trump knew that Vigo County and hundreds of small cities and rural areas like it were struggling. Manufacturers had been pulling out for decades, leaving behind the poor, the underemployed, and the undereducated. This was Trump’s America, a place where the promise of rebuilding the economy and fixing the ills of modern society resonates deeply with voters.

Vigo County has long served as a bellwether of American political sentiment. Its residents have voted for the winning candidate in all but two presidential elections since 1888. In this election, 55 percent of those who went to the polls chose Mr. Trump.

The challenges facing Vigo are familiar to many similar lower-income communities. More than half of schoolchildren receive free or reduced-price lunch, a proportion that grows every year. The median household income is $13,000 below the national average. Only 23 percent of the residents hold bachelor’s degrees, seven points below the national average. And a weak tax base, limited by state caps on property taxes, hinders efforts to repair infrastructure, keep up parks, and attract a more educated work force.

When the Republican candidate showed up here during the campaign, the 1,600-seat theater filled up quickly, and those who couldn’t get in hung around outside. “I was astonished at the palpable anger they felt,” said Don Campbell, who was filming a documentary about the county. “I think it was ‘the elites versus the rest of us.’ They wanted to kick some ass, and they saw Trump as the guy to do it.”

Higher education is often portrayed as part of this elite, and college campuses as enclaves of liberal privilege. In most states, the percentage of voters who favored Hillary Clinton was higher in counties with public flagship universities. But the dynamic changes in places with regional public universities and community colleges, like Vigo. Here, Indiana State University and Ivy Tech Community College aren’t islands but lifeboats. The economic and personal struggles that Mr. Trump spoke to are the same challenges these public institutions hope to help their students and communities overcome.

Yet, while the future president pledged to return jobs to the heartland and revive small towns battered by globalization, local leaders see a more complex situation. There are good jobs to be had, but not enough skilled workers to fill them. Vigo County has five colleges, but few graduates want to stay in the area. And the state has made work-force preparedness a priority, but poverty and its legacies — addiction, neglect, low expectations — have hamstrung the ability of educators to prepare students for work.

“For the city to begin to prosper, it has to keep more of its young people and increase the skill level of its citizens,” says Dan Bradley, president of Indiana State University, whose campus abuts the downtown. “And we haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

Mr. Bradley arrived at Indiana State in 2008, facing a steady decline in enrollment. In the years since, the student body has grown 30 percent, to 13,500. It expanded recruitment into other parts of the state and nearby Illinois, including Chicago and Indianapolis, as well as abroad. Yet it remains focused on serving students with academic and economic challenges. Half of its undergraduates are first-generation collegegoers; half are on Pell Grants.

In addition to getting more people in the door, the university is also pushing to get them out, and faster. Only about a quarter of Indiana State students graduate in four years, and less than half make it through in six. Some have family obligations that pull them back home, struggle academically, or live on the financial margins, working long hours to pay for school.

“We know who our students are, and we’re glad to have them,” says Mr. Bradley. Yet he wonders if those who set policy can say the same. “Too many of our political elite come from high-income backgrounds and don’t understand why it isn’t as easy for everyone else. They think, ‘I graduated in four years, why can’t you?’ "

Despite a decline in state funding, Indiana State has increased its four-year graduation rate from 20 percent to 26 percent, through a combination of early remedial work, intensive mentoring and tutoring, and, to align with a new state law, a reduced credit-hour requirement to graduate in most majors. To keep students close, the university finds them jobs as lifeguards, receptionists, and maintenance workers. To keep them on track, a new team of graduation specialists is reaching out to at-risk seniors struggling to complete courses and pay bills.

A number of the retention programs involve faculty members. Caitlin Brez, an assistant professor in the psychology department, participates in the First in the World program, a U.S. Department of Education effort to support interventions for students at risk of dropping out.

A graduate of Wake Forest University and the University of Texas at Austin, Ms. Brez said it took a while for her to fully understand the challenges facing her students at Indiana State. Things came to a head during an introductory psychology course for first-semester freshmen, when the grades of many of her students suffered because they could not afford the textbook. “That really made me think,” she says. “I didn’t do them any kind of service. I didn’t help them learn if they didn’t have the materials.” She told her department chair she wanted to redesign the class to build in alternatives, such as creating her own materials.

Still, fewer than one in four Vigo County residents has completed a four-year degree. That is a problem that shadows community leaders as they look to move the region away from low-wage jobs.

Pam Chamberlain’s story illustrates not only the complexities of this challenge but also the role that college can provide at crucial junctures in people’s lives. A Terre Haute native, Ms. Chamberlain grew up in a home where education wasn’t much discussed. Her mom was a secretary, her dad a laborer who moved from job to job as one plant after another closed.

Ms. Chamberlain wanted more. She earned an associate degree from Ivy Tech but she struggled through a series of office jobs, climbing up only to get knocked back down through layoffs or dead ends. After her mother, father, and best friend were struck with cancer, she started raising funds for charity, leading her to consider a career in communications.

To afford Indiana State, she had to work. So she became an events specialist at the university, where employees get 80-percent tuition discounts. For five years she has juggled her studies and a full-time job, working out of a second-story office in the student union with a walkie-talkie by her side. Her professors, she says, work well with students on tight budgets, and her supervisor is supportive of her earning a degree.

Ms. Chamberlain, now 43, will graduate in May. Her cap will say: Old Dog, New Tricks.

For many, including some of Ms. Chamberlain’s friends and family, such a path is too arduous to consider. Her sister got pregnant at 16, had three kids, and works part time at service jobs. Her husband is a machine operator, making plastic sheeting that goes into cereal boxes and around toilet paper. The work is hard, his back is often sore, but he has no desire for change. “You couldn’t pay him a million dollars to go back to school,” she says.

Raising a community’s aspirations, strengthening a regional economy, and interrupting the cycle of poverty are complicated endeavors. Ivy Tech and Indiana State try to respond to the root of these tangled problems, starting with social supports for their students and their neighborhoods.

Indiana State’s western border is on the Wabash River, which some community leaders, including Mr. Bradley, want to revitalize by incorporating an abandoned paper mill in a beautification project that will add housing, recreation, and commercial properties. The hope is that a nice waterfront would bolster Terre Haute’s appeal. But the county, short on cash, is going to build a new jail there instead, replaying a story line familiar to locals: hopeful plans stymied by economic realities.

But it’s the eastern edge of campus that reflects many of the city’s deepest challenges. The Ryves neighborhood, with blocks of small, faded homes and boarded-up buildings, used to be solidly blue collar. But job losses, methamphetamine addiction, and, more recently, the opioid epidemic have hit residents hard. Steady jobs have given way to part-time, low-paid service work and chronic unemployment.

The Ryves Youth Center, housed in a white-clapboard building owned by Catholic Charities, is a second home to many kids in the neighborhood, serving about 1,200 children a year. They come after school for a free meal, tutoring, sports, and clubs. Indiana State students are all around: playing basketball upstairs, reading to kids in the cafeteria, organizing a prom with donated dresses.

It’s one of many ways the university, through service work, internships, and work-study, involves itself in the community. Students and professors serve in low-income schools and run free clinics. Ivy Tech, too, is a partner in several of these efforts.

Christal Pickell understands these kids because she was one of them. An Indiana State student who tutors at Ryves and another youth center in town, she grew up in north Terre Haute, in a home filled with abuse and alcoholism. Her mother had her first child at 14. Her father, who has been in and out of jail, is illiterate. “My family,” says Ms. Pickell, “would fit on Jerry Springer.”

In her neighborhood, school was considered a waste of time. In high school, her guidance counselor told her that she wasn’t college material. If it weren’t for an aunt who had taken some classes at Ivy Tech, Ms. Pickell says, she never would have considered college. But there she discovered social work. She hopes to help other kids transcend the poverty, violence, and neglect that she experienced.

Ms. Pickell thinks back to her early years and wishes that someone had told her she wasn’t dumb, that school mattered, that college is affordable. “Kids don’t know college is an option for them,” she says of poor children in Vigo County. “They hear about the large bills and the student loans and the debt and not finding a job when you get done. They don’t hear about the good things. At least I never did. Nobody ever sat and talked to me about college.”

Three years ago, Ivy Tech decided to embed advisers in high schools to help students and their families navigate this terrain. Sarah Lockard, one of these college-connection coaches, was assigned to Terre Haute North Vigo High School — the same school that Ms. Pickell attended — where she advises dozens of students a week.

Most days you’ll find her scanning transcripts, course schedules, and financial-aid forms in her small office, fingers moving quickly across her keyboard as she puzzles out where each student stands. A former assistant registrar at Indiana State, she works with juniors and seniors to guide them into careers or college.

After lunch one day she checks in with a senior whose teacher had sent her for some direction. Jocelyn is taking dual-credit courses in medical careers, spending mornings in a nursing home before coming to class. She’s still wearing her scrubs over her shirt when she arrives at Ms. Lockard’s office.

Ms. Lockard wonders if Jocelyn, who is on-track to become a certified nursing assistant, has considered a nursing degree. She offers a quick overview of board exams and licensing, and explains how to save money by starting out at Ivy Tech and transferring to Indiana State. Jocelyn sits quietly, listening.

Has she taken the SAT? Filled out a Fafsa? Looked at college applications? “I haven’t done anything yet,” the teenager admits. Ms. Lockard tells her that if she gets her mother’s Social Security number, they can start filling out forms together the next day. “I’ll find you,” Ms. Lockard says. “It’s not too late.”

There is no one else like her in the school. Just five staff counselors serve 1,900 students, leaving little time for personalized career guidance.

Ms. Lockard’s whole job, by contrast, is to help students get into college or a trade. The state has increased the number of dual-credit and vocational classes offered in high schools, but families are not always aware of those opportunities.

Ms. Lockard, just a decade out of Terre Haute North herself, makes classroom visits and sees students one-on-one. She didn’t realize how challenged some are, she says, until she started this job. Some don’t know their home address, because they’ve moved around so much. Others don’t know what a ZIP code is.

Last year she worked with a girl who lived with her grandmother. Ms. Lockard ran into them at Walmart recently and learned that the girl is now enrolled in a nursing program at Ivy Tech. She felt good about that. Asked what would happen to many of the students she works with if she weren’t there, she pauses. “I don’t think they’d go,” she says, finally. “I don’t think they’d get it done.”

The skills gap has been talked about endlessly by pundits, economists, and policy makers. But here in Vigo County, it is an all-too-real dilemma that vexes virtually everyone working to make the local economy stronger.

Although the area’s largest employers are a hospital, the university, and the school system — and farms still dot the countryside — Terre Haute relies heavily on manufacturing for jobs. The south is home to plants that turn out auto parts, plastics, and processed steel. In the north sit two of the area’s largest companies: Bemis, the plastic-sheeting manufacturer, and Sony DADC.

The defining moment in the area’s decline came nearly a decade ago, when Pfizer Global Manufacturing, done in by a bad bet on inhaled insulin, packed up and left a place it had called home since 1948. Vigo lost about 800 well-paid positions that had supported taxes and corporate philanthropy. The plant, barricaded now with “No Trespassing” signs, sits idle as developers have tried to persuade other pharmaceutical or health-care companies to reopen it.

Many manufacturers want not only cheap land and tax breaks but also an educated work force. Most of the industry’s job losses have been in lower-skilled positions, while the number of positions for those with associate degrees or higher has grown significantly. Today in Indiana, more than half of manufacturing jobs are considered advanced manufacturing.

Mike Mitchell knows the recruitment challenges firsthand. As executive vice president and chief technology officer at Sony DADC, he runs the largest manufacturing employer in the area. More than 850 people on a stretch of road in north Terre Haute turn out CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. In a former life, this was Columbia Records and Columbia House, where thousands of workers filled record-of-the-month orders.

Walk through Mr. Mitchell’s operation, in which vast rooms are filled with multimillion-dollar machines turning out discs while small robots carry them from production to storage, and it’s easy to see how manufacturing has changed. The rooms are air-conditioned and scrupulously clean. Only a few lower-skilled workers are needed to watch over production and assembly.

Today Sony needs technicians. They could hold two- or four-year degrees, but they must understand machinery that uses things like programmable logic controllers, large-scale computer and system integration and motion control, and advanced sensing technologies. The jobs pay well, $45,000 to $65,000 a year, which should be a big deal in a county where the median household income is only $40,000. Yet jobs are hard to fill.

Mr. Mitchell thinks that colleges are doing what they should be doing, but that they’re not getting enough students in the door, and that many of those who enter are underprepared in the STEM disciplines. “It’s like a dog chasing its tail,” he says. “If any link in that chain is decoupled, it’s not going to be as effective.”

Indiana State and Ivy Tech have strengthened some of the weakening links between education and job readiness by better aligning their technical programs with work-force needs. Early one Tuesday morning, in a basement classroom at Indiana State, a dozen students listen to a lecture on the history of machining tools. Some days they work across the hall, honing their skills on mills, lathes, and other machines.

The class is part of a program in mechanical-engineering technology, one of the more popular degrees at Indiana State. The university has also created seven niche degrees within the College of Technology, in subjects such as unmanned systems and technology management, to keep up with the evolving economy.

The college has been a major driver of Indiana State’s enrollment growth, with the number of students more than doubling in the past seven years, to 2,400. “I cannot produce enough grads in certain areas, particularly in automation,” says Robert English, the dean.

Unlike Purdue University’s campus in Indianapolis, 70 miles away, or Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, an elite engineering school in the eastern part of the county, Indiana State aims for students who would rather work with machinery than design it. The jobs may not pay as much as professional engineering positions, but that’s what many companies prefer, says Benjamin Thomson, an instructor in the department of applied engineering and technology management. “They want a jack of all trades. That’s where we fit in,” he says. “We get more dirt under our fingernails.”

Ivy Tech has also created a number of programs tailored to evolving work-force needs. Precision agriculture draws students from around the region, many of whom come from farming families, to prepare them to work with high-tech equipment. Advanced automation and robotics technology is geared toward the automotive industry and other manufacturing fields. Like Indiana State, the college could fill many more seats — up to five times as many in some programs — and still find them jobs. The state estimates that of the million or so jobs opening in the next decade, about 30 percent will be “middle skilled,” requiring some postsecondary education up through an associate degree.

Since Ivy Tech started embedding counselors in high schools in the region, the college has seen applications go up and the need for remedial classes go down. But college officials would like to see more students who take dual-credit classes in high school enter Ivy Tech, getting them into the postsecondary pipeline. They worry that outdated views of manufacturing and a bias toward the four-year degree has steered students away from potentially good jobs.

“You hear this from employers,” says Jonathan Weinzapfel, chancellor of the Southwest and Wabash Valley Ivy Tech campuses, “that we have done kids a real disservice to tell them that the only path to success is getting a bachelor’s degree.”

Employers also struggle to find lower-skilled workers whom they can train to work in their plants, or advance beyond the jobs they already have. After Pfizer left, says Todd Hein, president of Labor Link, a temporary-employment agency, average wages dropped from about $12-$14 to around $10 an hour.

At that rate, he says, it’s a tough sell to get people off unemployment and onto factory floors. And once someone is in the door, “if they can make a nickel more an hour, they’re out of there. They don’t think about the long term.” That makes it difficult for employers to want to invest in training and build up a seasoned work force.

Rodney Dowell knows this challenge well. A work-force-development consultant at Ivy Tech, he works with 60 to 70 companies a year, training hundreds of people to fill technical positions. This is another role that higher education plays in Vigo County, helping people move up the skills ladder, from low- to semi-skilled jobs. It’s a critical job in a community struggling with underemployment.

Ivy Tech does this in two ways: signing people up for short-term courses that place them quickly in available jobs, and training workers already on the job. Both have proved successful but underused. A statewide program, Achieve Your Degree, allows employees of companies with tuition-reimbursement plans to take classes without having to pay upfront costs. But companies are so understaffed that they can’t always afford to let workers take time off, says Mr. Dowell.

Taking people off the streets is another option. But talk with anyone in Vigo County about the local labor pool, and the conversation quickly turns to substance abuse and life skills. Ivy Tech had to cancel its most recent 11-week class on operating computer numeric-code machines, a crucial skill in many manufacturing jobs, because none of the applicants who passed the assessment test also passed the drug test.

Daniel Pigg has been considering Terre Haute’s dilemma for some time. As director of Indiana State’s Business Engagement Center, he works with students to support dozens of small businesses and nonprofit groups. They created molds for a small chocolate company that wanted to automate production. They helped a small drone company test its machinery. And they collaborate with Launch Terre Haute, a new workspace, about a block away, for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Mr. Pigg wants to build a culture of innovation in a town that, as one local politician put it, “sees the glass half-empty rather than half-full.” The future, he says, does not lie in low-skilled jobs.

Whatever President Trump may do with taxes, tariffs, and deregulation, Vigo County needs an educated work force that is willing and able to develop this new economy — and that will maintain roots here.

“That’s the million-dollar question: How do we create an environment in which people want to stay here?” says Mr. Pigg. “It’s this giant puzzle none of us has been on the same page to solve.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.