The Break Away Award Recognition For Potential Technology Students

A Purdue University School of Technology site has established a successful program to formally recognize high school seniors for improved academic performance. Since the inception of the “BreakAway/ Award” in 1993, the marketing effort has increased the profile of Purdue’s technology curricula in the region. This paper details the critical factors and decisions involved in creating and implementing such a program. Background Purdue University’s School of Technology offers its degree programs at a number of sites in Indiana. The Richmond site currently serves about 150 students each semester in a relatively rural, seven-county region. A cooperative arrangement with Indiana University’s regional campus, IU East, enables Purdue’s students to conveniently obtain support coursework. While overshadowed locally by IU East, and distant from Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, the Richmond site must establish its own Purdue identity in the region. Marketing professionally to busy high school counselors and nearby industry is challenging for a small staff that also processes admissions, registration, financial aid, purchase requisitions, budgets and adjunct contracts. Although Purdue University technology degrees have been available for over twenty-five years in Richmond, the programs have remained relatively unknown. Local high school graduates routinely overlook nearby higher education; often leaving the area to enroll in similar programs. Non-traditional and underprepared students do not learn of the opportunities to succeed at Purdue’s technology site. To address this challenge, we devised a marketing project with three goals: ● Increase program awareness with high school students, parents, advisors, teachers, administrators and the community. ● Recognize “late expellers,” who can succeed in the technology programs. ● Associate the technology programs with serious, but “late excelling” students. We chose to create a recognition award for high school students. This paper details the award implementation and results. Award Definition Many crucial decisions were made at award definition. We chose to recognize one high school senior at each of the region’s eighteen high schools. Given current budgets, the award would include no monetary component. ?$iil&} 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings ‘.,+

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