Each year, fellowship and placement programs across Indiana identify high-achieving college seniors and recent graduates and match them with early-career roles at growing companies, most often in Indianapolis and Evansville.
These programs play an important role in the state’s workforce ecosystem. They help young professionals gain experience, build networks, and enter leadership pipelines more quickly. By many measures, they work well.
They also highlight a broader structural reality.
For much of rural Southwest Indiana, the earliest stages of talent development happen locally — in schools, families, and communities — while the next stages of opportunity are concentrated elsewhere. The result is not a failure of any one program, but a system where momentum naturally pulls outward.
This isn’t a criticism of individuals who leave to pursue opportunity. Mobility has always been part of economic growth. Nor is it a criticism of the organizations building these pipelines, many of which are responding rationally to where capital, scale, and infrastructure already exist.
It is, however, an opportunity to ask a more forward-looking question.
If rural communities are where talent is formed, how can regional systems better support continuity — not only creating paths out, but also paths back? How can experience gained in metro centers more easily translate into reinvestment, leadership, and enterprise closer to home?
Strengthening those connections doesn’t weaken Indiana’s cities. It strengthens the state as a whole.