Established through the 1992 Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program seeks to improve the education of the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) technicians. For several years, the ATE program was implemented through two major formats — broadly-conceived ATE national centers and narrowly-conceived ATE projects. ATE regional centers, first funded in 2001, were introduced to better address intermediate concerns surrounding STEM technicians and their employers. Regional centers work with community colleges and businesses in a single region, often defined as a state, to improve the effectiveness of education in one field of technology as a means to help meet the current and future workforce demands of their local economies.

In fall 2003, CCRC was awarded funding from NSF to examine how effective ATE regional centers have been in meeting these goals. CCRC’s research is now complete, and a report of the study submitted to NSF in fall 2007, titled ATE Regional Centers: CCRC Final Report, is available on CCRC’s website. Fieldwork for the study involved site visits and interviews with a range of individuals from each of eight regional centers distributed across the nation, from participating colleges, and from businesses partnering with each center. The research focused on the unique nature of the regional centers and the ability of centers to initiate institutional change in the delivery of technical education at community colleges. Findings suggest that regional centers are indeed viable and useful for the NSF ATE program.

Regional centers in the study sample tended to focus on one of two priorities in using academic program reform as a primary mechanism in meeting workforce development needs. The centers either prioritized technically oriented workshops offered to large numbers of faculty so as to reach greater numbers of students with industry-relevant content or they focused on developing new core curricula and pedagogy to improve the fundamental preparation of students entering STEM fields.

The study found that centers were able to satisfy distinctive workforce needs that existed or arose in their region despite often complex relationships between employers and each area’s educational institutions. Indeed, by bringing together multiple community colleges, universities, businesses, and, often, local and state government partners, the centers possessed many characteristics of a workforce intermediary. This could have implications for the role, structure, and sustainability of regional centers in the future.