Ken Sauer has spent his entire career in higher education in leadership positions and finding solutions at the federal, regional, and state levels. While serving in academic leadership positions most of this time, a throughline of his career has been on developing large databases, promoting interoperability of data, articulating competencies associated with credentials, and finding technical solutions to help students communicate the competencies and skills they have mastered. During his almost four decades as chief academic officer at the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, constant in Ken’s work in these and other areas was employing advice from advisory groups and utilizing a toolkit that included collaboration, incentives, policies, and legislation to achieve desired results.
Utilizing this skill set was essential to the development of the Indiana Achievement Wallet, which followed from Indiana’s participation in the work of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board. Ken was the liaison from the Commission for Indiana’s participation in the Board, and he led Indiana’s involvement in a related, subsequent National Governors Association (NGA) project focusing on digital wallets. He also led the state’s involvement with Credential Engine, in which Indiana became the first state to begin implementing the Credential Registry utilizing CTDL.
Ken’s intense interest in competencies and digital credentialing began with leading Indiana’s participation in a Lumina-sponsored, multi-state effort to explore potential implementation of the European Union’s Tuning efforts, part of the Bologna Process. Following this, he worked with the General Assembly to pass legislation to create a statewide general education core and statewide 2+2 articulation agreements, all fully transferable and all based on competencies. In subsequent years, he worked with academic leaders and faculty on numerous committees to implement the legislative mandate. Following this, the Indiana College Core also became widely available throughout the state as part of Indiana’s extensive dual credit system. Supporting and complementing this was the Indiana e-Transcript Initiative, which allowed the majority of high school transcripts to be sent as digital transcripts, utilizing the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC) schema.
Ken’s commitment to regional solutions was cultivated during the 17 years he served on the governing board of the Midwestern Higher Education Commission (MHEC), including a term as chair. Of special interest were the master contracts with vendors that saved money for MHEC states, colleges, and schools.
Before coming to Indiana, he worked in academic affairs at the Illinois Board of Higher Education and as a senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), where he provided primary staff support and worked with 70+ national and other organizations to develop the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to annually collect degree data from all colleges and universities; NCES still uses CIP codes to do this. Under another federal contract, he co-developed a model that used national databases to project U.S. nursing supply and demand by educational level, which was used in mandated reports to Congress and by more than a dozen states.
He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Government. His honors include Sagamore of the Wabash and the Phillip L. Sirotkin Award, the highest awards made by the State of Indiana and MHEC, respectively.
