Industrial and Engineering Technology Scholarship Project

Kentucky Community & Technical College System, Versailles KY

Investigators

Abstract

The Industry & Engineering Technology (I&ET) Scholarship project is identifying, recruiting, graduating and placing in jobs related to the degree discipline 12 students with the Associate of Applied Science degree in I&ET. The project doubles the number of students who typically graduate from the program in any given year and enables the college to address a significant local industrial need, as well as serve a traditionally underserved population of low income academically talented students. Within the past year, three new light-manufacturing plants have opened in the college's service area. Data compiled by local economic development officials indicate that these plants alone create a need for approximately 1,000 new jobs during the next five years, many of which require high technology skills. The I&ET program prepares graduates for the kind of high technology skills these new employers demand. A unique feature of the I&ET Scholarship Project is that it makes use of existing federally funded outreach and student support programs already in place at the college that have been operating successfully since the 1980s and whose target populations are identical to the target population for I&ET scholarship recipients: low income, traditionally underrepresented, academically talented students. I&ET faculty collaborate with the staff of these existing federal programs, Upward Bound (UB) and Educational Talent Search (ETS), to recruit and select project participants. Once enrolled, I&ET faculty collaborate with Student Support Services (SSS) staff to develop a comprehensive Individual Education Plan for each student that serves as a blueprint for academic success. Successful retention and support strategies are then incorporated in the plan so that students become part of a learning community who succeed in the classroom and persist to graduation. I&ET faculty and industry representatives then collaborate with the college's Placement Office staff to ensure that all graduates receive job search training and are successfully placed within six months of graduation. Since the inception of the I&ET program, 100% of its graduates have been successfully placed in jobs related to the discipline.