New member joins Indiana Commission for Higher Education

When Carol D’Amico was appointed to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education last month, the goals she was presented with and the challenges faced by Indiana’s university system were steep.

Luckily for D’Amico, she’s no stranger to working in education.

On Dec. 8, Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed D’Amico as an at-large member to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, following the retirement announcement of long time commission member Stan Jones. Jones will step down in April.

The appointment comes as Daniels has already cut state university funding by 1 percent for next year, hoping to keep Indiana’s budget balanced. A proposed 4 percent cut could soon follow.

D’Amico is also the president and CEO of Conexus Indiana, an economic development initiative focusing on hi-tech manufacturing and logistics. 

The Commission, created in 1971, is the state’s primary advisory board to university officials and politicians.  

Brad Rateike, deputy press secretary for the Governor’s office, said in an e-mail that D’Amico was an obvious choice for the Commission.

“She is highly qualified and Gov. Daniels has always had a great deal of respect for her,” Rateike said.

Both her experience and qualifications gel with Daniels’ expressed goals to transform Indiana’s economy into one focusing on technological development.

In 2001, D’Amico was appointed the assistant secretary for the Office of Vocational and Adult Education by former President George W. Bush, where she worked for two years.

While serving as secretary, D’Amico was the chief spokesperson and leading adviser to the secretary of education on matters concerning high school reform, community colleges and adult literacy.

D’Amico later served as the executive vice president for Ivy Tech Community College. While there, she was responsible for the general operations of the college and worked with all 14 campuses on various programs including strategic planning, external relations and marketing.

The Commission for Higher Education was created to help define and construct various goals for Indiana’s education system.

Recently the commission adopted 12 goals known as “Indiana’s State-Level Higher Education Dashboard.” One of these goals includes increasing the number of students who transfer from Ivy Tech Community College to other colleges 50 percent by 2015.
In a recent essay published on the Inside INdiana Business Web site, D’Amico wrote that Indiana has lower participation rates of non-traditional students in higher education than the national average.

“We lag the nation in adults enrolling in post-secondary education programs,” D’Amico wrote, “and this percentage has dropped over the last five years.”

IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said various IU campuses have begun to see more transfers from Ivy Tech over the past few years.

“IU has worked with Ivy Tech to help create certain course sequences that would transfer to IU,” MacIntyre said. “We have designated certain Ivy Tech courses that would be accepted at IU.”

Another goal of the commission is to increase college preparation by enforcing the Core 40 high school curriculum. By 2015, they plan to have increased the number of Core 40 graduates by 50 percent.

To correspond with this goal, IU has made the general acceptance requirements to the Bloomington campus more difficult than they have been in the past.

“Generally accepted requirements for Bloomington have been increased to be effective by 2011, “ MacIntyre said. “This puts more pressure on students who want to come to IU.”