When Jim Lewis was preparing to interview for the job of executive director of the Vaughan Institute of Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, he did what any entrepreneur and creative strategist would do.

He interviewed his customers.

“I talked to probably 100 students, and walked around campus,” he said from his office on UI’s campus. “I talked to a ton of parents. I talked to some employers. I talked to people that I knew were in the business. … It became pretty clear that there’s a tremendous potential here, but there’s a disconnect between what goes on at a university campus and what goes on in the real world. So the theme that I quickly saw and was able to validate … was we needed collaborative innovation.”

That was the birth, in summer 2023, of his strategic plan that he relies on today to recruit students to the fast-growing risk management program at the Vaughan Institute and Tippie College of Business. It is juxtaposed against a looming talent shortage in the insurance industry, which, like many other fields, is facing a swell of retirements in the coming years.

“I’m implementing basically every single thing that I had [in the strategic plan],” Lewis said.

Among the insights he gained was what motivates this generation of students.

They want to avoid boredom. They are skeptical, seeing their friends rack up college debt without a job waiting for them. Finally, they want to make an impact and have a purpose, Lewis said.

What that led him to create was a highly experiential program with promises of higher-than-average salaries and jobs. And he emphasizes purpose in conversations across campus.

“That actually aligns really well with the risk [business],” he said. “That’s what the risk [business] is all about. You’re trying to make the world safer, smarter, more secure. You’re trying to help put lives back together when bad things go wrong, restoring, and getting them back on their feet when a husband or a wife passes and suddenly that education is at risk for those kids. That’s what insurance provides in many cases, and it also helps protect and secure assets so people can fulfill their dreams.”

A history of insurance expertise 

The UI has a history of producing leaders in risk management and insurance. The namesake of the Vaughan Institute, Emmett Vaughan, began his University of Iowa career in 1963 as an assistant professor, directing the college’s efforts in insurance education. He was essential in helping the university earn a distinguished reputation in the field of insurance education in the 1970s and 1980s while mentoring many of the industry’s top leaders, according to the institute’s website. He died in 2004.

“Emmett Vaughan was kind of the anchor point for insurance, particularly insurance education across the country,” said Tippie Dean Amy Kristof-Brown. “He produced a textbook that pretty much everybody used. So everybody, even if they weren’t at Iowa, learned from Dr. Vaughan, because of the textbook that he produced.”

Kristof-Brown made the decision in 2023 to reinstate the risk management and insurance major, which was last offered in the ’60s, she said.

She said the decision to reinvest in insurance education was “largely due to alumni saying, ‘You guys really need an insurance major, and it’s crazy that Iowa, with the Vaughan Institute of Risk Management and Insurance, doesn’t have an insurance major.’”

“We went about creating that major, and then we hired an executive director to help lead the institute. I think the combination of having the major that was new, and then having the institute really lean into internships and placement and opportunities to interact with companies, I think students just gravitated towards it very quickly.”

Since the 2022-23 school year, the risk management program has grown to more than 491 undergraduate students, Lewis said. (In May 2023, the school had 50 students enrolled in the risk management and insurance certificate program, he said). 

“The risk management program … has exceeded the growth in any of our other programs during that time period,” Kristof-Brown said.

The risk management and insurance program at the UI is currently the third largest among undergraduate programs nationwide, according to the magazine Business Insurance’s annual survey. The ranking was determined by enrollment size and number of graduates in 2024-25, when Tippie’s program had 350 undergraduates, according to the survey. No other Iowa programs were listed in the top 20 rankings.

The program’s success comes at a critical time as retirements are expected to create a talent shortage in the insurance industry. Lewis pointed to Insurance Thought Leadership, a global network of insurance and risk management thought leaders, which published statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It projects that the U.S. insurance industry could lose roughly 400,000 workers through attrition by 2026. 

“Most of those departures will come through retirement,” Insurance Thought Leadership wrote.

And this is a crucial issue for Iowa, which ranks first nationally in insurance industry output as a percentage of GDP, according to the Iowa Economic Development Authority. More than 102,000 insurance industry professionals work in Iowa.

“There’s just so much need for talent,” said Michael Gould, the manager of business development for the Iowa Economic Development Authority, who runs the state’s Insure Your Future program, an early-stage internship program targeted at college freshmen and sophomores to help them gain experience in Iowa’s insurance industry. “We [have it] on both ends where we’ve got literally fewer students coming into the pipeline, and then we’ve got more people retiring.”

The Insure Your Future program has grown from 67 interns when it launched in 2023 to 104 in 2025, he said.

Battling misconceptions, recruiting students

Labor shortages are happening while the industry also battles misconceptions about working in insurance, according to a UI professor.

One misconception is simply about what jobs are available when you pursue a career in insurance, said Richard Peter, the Nationwide professor of finance at the Tippie College of Business. 

He said people often think a career in insurance only means working in sales and selling policies. Among the classes he teaches are enterprise risk management, which covers how businesses identify and prepare for potential risks across the organization.

“Actually, there are dozens of career tracks in insurance, and it’s not just about selling insurance. There’s underwriting claims … cybersecurity, cyber risk. It’s fairly analytical,” he said. There’s also data science and things like catastrophe modeling, and especially with the brokerage, they have to think about catastrophe and reinsurance, compliance and regulation, product development, risk management, employee benefits, loss control. So it’s very, very broad. It’s very varied.”

And sometimes the industry itself is also viewed or portrayed negatively, he said. 

“People say, ‘Oh, they give you a hard time and they nitpick and then you’re not going to get your claim paid, and you have to argue with them and whatnot, right?’” he said. “Some of the things that we do in our classroom is we help our students understand, ‘Why do insurance companies have to be careful claim payers?’ Well, on the other … side, there’s also things like insurance fraud going on, so insurance companies have to balance that, because they really have to be stewards of the premium money that they collect and make sure that honest claims are being honored and that illegitimate claims are being found out.”

Gabe Clark, a UI sophomore studying finance and risk management insurance, said the reasons for choosing an insurance major are multifaceted, but it started when Lewis showed up at his business fraternity, Delta Sigma Pi. 

Clark recalled how Lewis made the case for studying insurance, noting that it’s a great way to stay in Des Moines (Clark grew up in North Liberty and wants to stay in Iowa), the salaries are higher and there are early-stage internship opportunities like the Insure Your Future program.

“Just really hearing how passionate Jim was about the topic, seeing somebody that can get so fired up about something as simple and non-glamorous as insurance, kind of spoke to me,” Clark said. “He drives a convertible, and the license plate on that convertible says, ‘RISKBIZ.’ I mean, you talk about a guy that is 100% bought-in.”

Clark said Lewis, an entrepreneur, has “gone out, he’s made his money.”

“He doesn’t need to be working right now, but he loves this business so much, and he loves the impact that he has on students so much that he’s still putting in these 50, 60, probably even 70-hour weeks, making sure that there are events for us to go to, companies for us to talk to,” he said.

Positioning future leaders for the insurance industry

Cole Phillips graduated from the University of Iowa in May 2024 with risk management and insurance and finance degrees, and is now working in Cedar Rapids as an insurance broker for Holmes Murphy.

He said a younger workforce views the coming retirements as an exciting opportunity and that businesses should invest in young employees.

“Is there something that your business can do to help train those people that are younger to be able to step into those roles at a younger age?” Phillips said. “It’s not just about being in the industry when the retirements happen, but it’s also being ready to step up when the retirements happen.”

He said companies should create initiatives where they train the next generation of leaders.

“To be a part of something like that would be awesome,” he said.

The future of the Vaughan Institute is focused on becoming globally recognized as the leading risk management and insurance program, as well as shaping the future of risk management and insurance in part through artificial intelligence, Lewis said. The UI, in partnership with Plug and Play, a global innovation platform, has plans to open an Iowa AI Center of Excellence in the early part of 2026 at the John and Mary Pappajohn Education Center located in downtown Des Moines at 1200 Grand Ave.

The Iowa AI Center of Excellence will aim to be a strategic hub, bringing together public and private sectors, academia and artificial intelligence startups to drive economic growth in the state, according to information provided by the University of Iowa.

The focus areas of the center will include practical AI adoption, talent development and workforce upskilling, and elevating Iowa’s ecosystem as AI leaders, according to the UI documents. 

“What we’ll be doing initially is focusing on the sector of insurance,” Lewis said. 

He said he believes AI technologies will be a “critical solution” to the industry’s talent shortage.

The vision is a young college grad would be able to help “map that out and be able to build AI agents to take that burden of not having enough claims people or not having enough underwriters, not [having] enough claims adjusters,” he said.

He said he can’t produce enough graduates to solve the talent shortage, but AI can help.

“If we had every college in the state doing everything we could, it still wouldn’t be enough,” he said. “There’s too much demand, so we need to figure out how to connect AI as part of the solution, along with students.”