IU Army ROTC named No. 1 senior program in the nation

Physical fitness training at 6 a.m. has its perks, as proven by the No. 1 ranking The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America recently gave the IU Army ROTC program for 2007.

The award is based on an evaluation of each of the 272 active ROTC programs in the nation. IU Army ROTC will receive the award at the Order of the Founders and Patriots of America awards banquet sometime this fall.

The first part of the criteria for the award is retention, or the number of cadets who stay in the program, which showed a 92 percent retention rate – well over the national average of 70 percent, said Sgt. 1st Class Roy Hughes.

The second level of evaluation was scholarships. IU recruited 19 cadets to a four-year scholarship, again beating the national average of eight to nine recruits, Hughes said.

Following these evaluations, the IU Army ROTC was then tested on how well it produced leaders through the Leader Development and Assessment Course. The course tests how well juniors in the program perform, Hughes said. The IU Army ROTC had 62 percent of its cadets ranked as excellent leaders, 40 percent more than the national average, he said.

The Leader’s Training Course, run in the summer at Fort Knox, Ky., is a course that can give a junior credit for the first two years of ROTC, Hughes said. The course is designed to see how many cadets sign a contract with the government to become officers. The IU Army ROTC saw 100 percent of the cadets sign a contract. Hughes said he feels this was a vital part to their success.

“The last two years have been some of the best in my 24-year career,” he said. “I believe that the teamwork within our organization and our pursuit of excellence in producing officers for the Army is why we deserved this award.”

Another part of the evaluation is seeing if the program reached its mission, or number of cadets it produced. The IU Army ROTC program has reached its mission for the past five years, said Lt. Col. Eric D. Arnold, also a professor of military science at IU.
The IU Army ROTC expects to have about 130 students back in the fall, which is above the average program’s number of about 90 students, Hughes said.