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Over the last decade, the emergence of technician education has taken center stage at secondary and post-secondary educational institutions through the proliferation of industry needs and employer-partner engagement. Through employer-partner engagement, Southern University at Shreveport, Louisiana (SUSLA), a community college unit within the Southern University and A&M College System, conducted a systematic review, assessment, and revision of its curricula that addressed the needs of industry. SUSLA’s comprehensive assessment, guided by employer-partner input, community college and 4-year university collaborations, and published workforce data, identified a pressing need to develop an Engineering Technology program. To that end, SUSLA developed a 2+2+2 Matriculation Model within the Engineering Technology associate of applied science degree program designed as a gateway to enable early education, persistence to post-secondary credentials of value, and high-quality career outcomes. Programs with similar demographics may be able to use this as a model which aims to do four things: 1) facilitate the early engagement of students decreasing the number of academically underprepared learners entering college, 2) expand postsecondary educational opportunities to improve outcomes fostering economic opportunity 3) increase the enrollment, persistence and graduation of early education and underserved populations in STEM and, 4) facilitate a reduction in time to degree. SUSLA’s 2+2+2 Matriculation Model provides high school students with the opportunity to earn dual-enrollment post-secondary credentials through its certificate of technical offerings in Engineering and Engineering Technology. Additionally, the model facilitates an increase in the participation rate of students in STEM and provides more academic opportunities and career exploration through collaborative industry-academic networks. Furthermore, the model produces workforce-ready technicians which accelerates academic and technical skill attainment and, thereby addresses a) the shortage in moderate to middle-skill jobs that require some college, but less than a bachelor’s degree; and b) the ongoing need for highly skilled STEM graduates to maintain the nation’s competitiveness in productivity and innovation.
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This content will become publicly available on April 4, 2026
Building Connections, Building Workforce; a Discussion of an ARC POWER Grant
In West Virginia, the unemployment rate is 3.6% (2024) and the workforce participation rate is 55.1% (2024) suggesting 44.9% of work-eligible people are not participating in the workforce while another 3.6% are looking for work. We have identified attracting and retaining job-ready employees, inadequate communication and collaboration, and misperceptions among students and job seekers concerning the diverse career opportunities available in WV as challenges within the region. The ARC POWER grant project, “Building Connections to Grow Capacity: Breaking Down Regional Barriers in the STEM Workforce Pipeline” addresses these challenges and have proposed many opportunities to overcome these barriers making a connection between industry, academics and educators, students and other jobseekers, and workforce entities to develop the STEM workforce in the service region of Fairmont State University (FSU) and Glenville State University (GSU) through a Regional Career Services and Workforce Development Collaborative. Several areas of the grant are likely of interest to educators in academia, including an emphasis on forming industry advisory boards to help build stronger relationships between academia and industry and also aid in refining curriculum and a focus on both student and industry engagement and instructor and industry engagement to create opportunities for job shadowing, internships and other opportunities between these groups. This grant provides resources for fostering collaboration among people who might not normally interact, and this collaboration can produce an enormous impact on the STEM workforce in our region.
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- PAR ID:
- 10594862
- Publisher / Repository:
- PKP Publishing Services Network
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the West Virginia Academy of Science
- Volume:
- 97
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0096-4263
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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