STEM education got a big boost recently out of Arizona Western College in Yuma in collaboration with the University of Arizona. The Department of Education granted the community college nearly 6 million dollars to fund a new BA program geared toward underserved students on the border. Maya Springhawk Robnett with the Arizona Science Desk reports…
The 5.9 million dollars will be spent over a period of five years to develop curriculum, train educators, and build the facilities. The award will fund a BA program in Informatics, based in South Yuma County—right on the U.S./Mexico border. Informatics as a field focuses on how data is used and organized.
Jana Moore, the Associate Dean for Academic and Instructional Support for Arizona Western College, is overseeing the grant’s implementation. She says a degree in Informatics is especially useful in the Information Age…
“We know our lives are all about big data," Moore says, "There’s health data, there’s manufacturing, they’re selling up things. Anything in the world right now is data driven.”
Susan Dempsey-Spurgeon is the Director of Grants at AWC and was the primary grant writer for the award. She says her goal was to offer a degree that would be useful to the region.
“Because our unemployment rate is so high, we don’t obviously don’t want to build something that people can’t get jobs in." Dempsey-Spurgeon explained, "And what we found is that a lot of the employers are having to bring people in from the outside to fill those vacancies.”
The program is slated to launch in Fall 2018.