The Illinois Institute of Technology, a Bronzeville university laser-focused on STEM before it was cool, this month opens its first new academic building in nearly 50 years. The debut of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation & Tech Entrepreneurship is a milestone for a changing university in a transforming neighborhood.

Illinois Tech President Alan Cramb's plan to expand student headcount by 1,000, or 15 percent, depends on recruiting more students from outside the state and seeking a higher percentage of undergraduates, as its big population of foreign grad students declines. The new institute should aid that effort as the modernist campus designed by famed former faculty member Ludwig Mies van der Rohe regains luster in a Bronzeville revival.

"We need to grow, and if you look at it, the student population in Illinois is not increasing, so we know over time it's going to decrease," Cramb says. "We made the decision that we should be in the areas that are growing," he says, rattling off state targets for recruitment, including California, Washington, Texas, Florida, Minnesota and East Coast locales.

The Armour Institute opened near Illinois Tech's South Side location in 1893, with $1 million from the wealthy Chicago meatpacking family of the same name and changed its name to Illinois Institute of Technology after the first of multiple mergers over the decades that added the Institute of Design, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Stuart School of Management & Finance (now Stuart School of Business) and Midwest College of Engineering.

Today, the private school's main campus, designed by German-born Mies, sprawls over 120 acres near 33rd and State streets, with locations downtown and in suburban Wheaton and Bedford Park.

Among majors for Illinois Tech undergrads, computer science is most popular, followed by architecture and mechanical engineering. Other studies, including at the graduate level, include life sciences, applied technology, business and law.

The new $37 million Kaplan Institute will give students across the school's disciplines a place to test ideas with an eye to business innovation. It's named for engineer alumnus Ed Kaplan, who co-founded bar-code technology company Zebra Technologies and gave $11 million in 2014 to jump-start funding for the institute.

"Universities want to have these centers of gravity," says Mark Harris, CEO of the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition. Illinois Tech lagged its more prestigious Chicago rivals, Northwestern University and University of Chicago, in creating one, but it's making headway now on infrastructure to support entrepreneurial activity, he says.