Growing and Keeping Your Region’s College-Educated Workers (cont.)

Indicators that the KIP strategy is delivering its intended results include:

• Over a three-year period, freshmen enrollments at partner colleges have grown by 10 percent (well ahead of both the state and national averages), and Philly’s overall student population has increased by more than 30,000.

• An online student poll conducted last spring found that 64 percent of students are likely to stay in the region after they graduate, a 15 percent increase over the benchmark conducted in 2002.

• Most importantly, actual retention has increased by more than 1,000 graduates since 2004, a number that should rise rapidly as more early-stage professional positions become available.

KIP (now known as Campus Philly) holds an outdoor student festival each year which draws more than 20,000 students into downtown Philadelphia.

Additional research published in 2004 by KIP strongly suggests that a winning recipe for grad retention requires much more than a regional internship strategy. This survey of 2,550 recent graduates from 29 area colleges and universities reveals other key behavior influencers, namely personal connection.² Positive off-campus experiences and affinity for the region proved to be especially significant for non-native students whose eventual actions are a top priority. (Philadelphia already keeps 86 percent of its locally grown grads.)

In fact, internships alone can often backfire in less competitive regions by helping their most ambitious talent (including many native sons and daughters) become more marketable to employers from hotter markets. Ultimately, this points to the necessity for a multi-tiered approach that facilitates better professional and personal connections to the host region.

In Pennsylvania, three other regional retention initiatives – in Pittsburgh, Lehigh Valley and Lancaster County – have since been modeled after KIP. This opens up further opportunities for statewide retention strategies that could ultimately leverage a network of parallel activities, centrally coordinated but deployed at the local level.

Northeast Ohio: COLLEGE 360º

Admiration for the Philadelphia model also led to the development of Northeast Ohio’s ambitious COLLEGE 360º initiative. At an EDA-sponsored innovation summit held in Cleveland in November 2003, more than 220 regional stakeholders – representing a cross-section of academic, corporate and civic leaders – first learned about KIP and drew parallels to their own economic challenges.

Almost immediately, an effort led by the region’s academic consortium, the Northeast Council on Higher Education, raised the necessary funds to implement a research and planning phase that eventually led to the launch of COLLEGE 360º in 2005. Northeast Ohio, as a community, would step forward and accept responsibility for “providing a complete, 360º college education; one that prepares the whole student for all aspects of life after college, not just their role in the workforce.”

The initiative draws its strength from commitments by the region’s top corporate, philanthropic and civic leaders. At its helm sits Hiram College President Tom Chema and Cleveland Indians President Paul Dolan, who co-direct the four-year, $5 million initiative. Backing them up is a crackerjack steering committee of 18 corporate CEOs, college presidents and partners from the region’s top law firms.

While its mission is similar to Philadelphia’s, the branding platform and related tactical plan developed for Northeast Ohio are custom-tailored. For starters, not one, but two city identities needed to be considered and carefully dealt with: Cleveland and Akron. The long history of sibling rivalry not withstanding, here was a chance to showcase regionalism in action, a challenge Northeast Ohio had been wrestling with for some time.

While it is still too early to gauge overall success, initial reactions from students currently enrolled at COLLEGE 360º’s 17 participating colleges indicate that this initiative is hitting home. And within less than a year of the project’s debut, nearly 1,900 new internships had been created in the region, well on the way to meeting the stated goal of generating 3,600 internships in the region within 36 months.

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² The report, titled “Should I stay or should I go,” is available as a PDF at www.collegia.com.