Both Eastern’s and Lake Land’s boards of trustees met in an adjourned meeting for the first time at Lake Land Community College. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the combined efforts between both Eastern and Lake Land, discussing future collaboration efforts and issues within higher education.

Dan Nadler, the vice president for student affairs, said the meeting was to look at the ways Eastern and Lake Land could work together in the future and how they worked together in the past.

“(The purpose was) collaboration to look at ways in which we have collaborated in the past, that we worked together, but most importantly we could do in the future to work together, to support each other, to really help take each other to the next level,” Nadler said.

During the meeting, the board members discussed the future of higher education, including the lack of skills within the work force, students leaving Illinois and international opportunities for students.

“Like many other institutions looking very closely at international student recruitment, we’ve had some really nice increases in our student enrollment with regard to international students,” Nadler said. “Recruiting has become a very difficult, challenging process, so we just have to continue working hard on it, try to work at convincing students to stay in the state of Illinois, and convincing some perspective students outside of the state that EIU is a great place to come and learn.”

Catie Witt, the executive vice president, was the student representative at the board meeting.

“For the lack of skills in the workplace, I think what they were trying to explain was that the job market is asking for more and more,” Witt said. “Back in the day, you didn’t have to go to college, but now you kind of have to, and now its getting to the point where like you can go to grad school if you, but probably in the future, you have to go to grad school.”

Witt also said the job market is getting harder, and the people that are graduating do not have the high quality skills the job market wants.

“I know Eastern does not have a problem with recruiting international students because we have a lot,” Witt said. “I think we have a little below 300 international students from all over. Eastern doesn’t have a huge problem with that, but Lake Land and Eastern want to work together and just kind of spread the word globally of not only Eastern, but Lake Land as well.”

Witt said both Lake Land president and President Bill Perry traveled to China, trying to pair with other universities from China to promote both Eastern and Lake Land internationally.

Luis Martinez can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]