Yet another announcement this week from Vincennes University involving the formation of a partnership with the private sector to train future manufacturing workers.
On Thursday, at a ceremony on the VU Jasper Campus, university president Dick Helton signed off on an agreement with seven Jasper-area companies that calls for full-time students in the tech-manufacturing program to be able to both have part-time manufacturing jobs and pursue their associate degrees.
Students will work for one of the companies on Mondays and Fridays and take VU classes Tuesday through Thursday, completing their degrees within the requisite two years and more than likely landing good-paying, full-time jobs in the bargain.
Vincennes University also has just such an agreement with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana in Princeton, where the students work at the plant two days a week and take classes at VU's Gibson County Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Logistics; they get their degrees and go back to work full-time.
The university also has a center like the Gibson County facility at its Jasper campus, which it will utilize with this latest partnership.
From all corners of the state we hear of the need for highly-trained, skilled workers to fill open positions in manufacturing, jobs which, we are also told, come with high pay and enviable benefit packages.
So desperate is the need for these workers that the state wants high schools to begin offering what are essentially the same classes and programs that VU now includes in its technology syllabus.
Where high schools would come up with the money to begin offering such classes and programs is beyond us.
Aside from the additional money such programs would require, high school shouldn't be about training for a job but about preparing for life — or to at least have graduates who are as prepared as possible to make an educated decision on what they might want to do with their lives and well-rounded enough to change their minds.
Providing the education workers require and the manufacturing sector of the economy so desperately needs should be left in the hands of institutions most able to provide it, and right now the best at that is the faculty and staff at Vincennes University.
The university is proving itself ready to become THE engine of economic growth for Southwestern Indiana — if it hasn't already reached that stage.
This is quite an accomplishment considering it wasn't all that long ago that university officials were trying to work out in just what direction the state's oldest institution of higher learning should proceed — and were getting all sorts of advice.
We recall the comments years ago from a then member of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, who all but recommended that Vincennes University reconcile itself to becoming a sort of remediation center for those high school graduates who required a couple more years of special help before they were ready to move on to receive a "real" college education.
If the university would do that, such was the implication, additional state support would be coming its way.
Thankfully, VU officials disregarded that advice.
Today, the university is training the manufacturing workforce of tomorrow plus taking care to nurture the arts, inspire the mind, teach the children, enforce the law, protect the environment, etc., etc.