STEM educationColleges, labs develop STEM core curriculum

The success of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Engineering Technology Program to educate veterans for technical careers has inspired a statewide push to create an educational core curriculum to prepare junior college students for technical jobs at California’s national labs.

The core curriculum being designed by a consortium of community colleges, national labs, and nonprofit educational institutes emphasizes a heavy focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses to prepare women, minorities, veterans, and other underserved populations for high-paying jobs as technologists.

An LLNL release reports that the consortium recently met at the Livermore Valley Open Campus’ High Performance Computing and Innovation Center to lay the groundwork for a common STEM educational standard that colleges can adopt, and to develop internships and other employment pipelines for national labs in the state. Those labs include LLNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We believe it’s important to provide underserved communities with a strong STEM curriculum in college because there are so many opportunities for exciting and financially rewarding careers in this area,” said Beth McCormick, LLNL Engineering’s Recruiting and Diversity manager, who helped create the Engineering Technology Program and organized the statewide STEM core consortium meeting. “The national labs need a pipeline of talent to fill hundreds of technical positions in the next five years.”

Implemented over the summer, the Engineering Technology Program is a 24-month academic program to provide veterans with a technical education at Las Positas College and hands-on training at Lawrence Livermore. Created by LLNL, Las Positas, the Alameda County Workforce, and the nonprofit Growth Sector, the program is designed to help veterans develop the skills and training for engineering technician careers and establishes a pipeline of qualified candidates for LLNL and other Bay Area employers such as NASA, Sandia, and Lawrence Berkeley.

The STEM consortium is seeking to build upon the Engineering Technology Program and other pilot programs focusing on providing advanced math curriculums and a cohort educational model that has proven to retain greater numbers of students within STEM programs.

Community colleges see high STEM dropout rates because many of the underprivileged students enrolled in these classes are not adequately prepared in math and science at their high schools. In order to survive in a high-tech based economy, they will need to succeed in this area.