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SPRINGFIELD - Springfield Technical Community College is expected to lead the charge in preparing today's students for tomorrow's telecommunications careers, from fiber optics installation to millimeter wave engineering.
STCC has won an initial $3 million National Science Foundation grant to develop curriculums in telecommunications, in participation with nearly 20 Northeast colleges and universities and 14 high schools. The announcement is to be made today by STCC President Andrew M. Scibelli and Allan Blair, president of the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts.
"We've made a huge investment in technology ... outsiders are looking in and seeing it," Scibelli said yesterday during an interview at the Union-News.
The college, which stands to get an additional $2 million from the NSF, is putting $500,000 of its own funds into the program, and has gotten about $4.5 million in matching grants from private companies in the telecommunications industry.
The $10 million program will create the National Center for Telecommunications Technology at STCC, which will develop telecommunications education programs, textbooks and CD-ROMs, while monitoring trends in the telecommunications industry.
STCC will also begin offering a special associate's degree program a year from now to prepare students for telecommunications careers, with the first class graduating in 2000. The program will dovetail with existing courses in fiber optics, electronics and laser technology, and the college may consider offering a four-year telecommunications degree in the future, Scibelli said.
About 50 students are expected to enroll in the initial associate's degree program, said John H. Dunn, executive vice president of academic affairs, who will direct the new telecommunications center.
The NSF, in granting funds, designated STCC one of its nine National Centers of Excellence in Advanced Technological Education nationwide.
Business partners in the telecommunications center will help create the college and high school telecommunications curriculums to help ensure jobs for graduates. The companies involved include NYNEX/Verizon Corp., Northeast Utilities, Media One, IBM, and Time Warner Cablevision, among others.
Although the center currently has funding for just five years, the college hopes telecommunications companies will eventually step forward to help sustain it.
Economic development officials were enthusiastic about the coming National Center for Telecommunications Technology yesterday, saying it will benefit the region in many ways. Conferences on telecommunications will come to Springfield as a result, they said, bringing money to local hotels, shops and restaurants. Meanwhile, the center and the new STCC telecommunications degree program may help attract telecommunications companies to Western Massachusetts, because they could tap the STCC student population for prospective employees. "This will draw their attention to Western Massachusetts," said W. Geoffrey Little, president of Telitcom Development Corp., a non-profit economic development group that has been working to turn Western Massachusetts into a telecommunications and high-technology hot spot and helped plan the new center.
Overall, the center is viewed as a positive step because the telecommunications industry is growing rapidly across Massachusetts. The state has the highest concentration of telecommunications workers in the nation, according to a recent report by Craig L. Moore, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Employment in the state's telecommunications industry grew by 61 percent between 1993 and 1996.
"What Western Massachusetts should become ... is the telecommunications valley for Massachusetts," Scibelli said.
However, students in schools and colleges across the state and the nation are not learning the math and science they need for careers in the telecommunications industry, Scibelli said, adding that a curriculum development goal for the new center will be to make those subjects more fun for students.
STCC will run the National Center for Telecommunications Technology in-house and will use existing staff for most of the curriculum development and teaching required, although about five people will be hired to support the program, Dunn said.
STCC will develop the new telecommunications curriculums with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth; the University of Hartford; Vermont Technical College; Bristol Community College of Fall River; Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick; Springfield High School of Science and Technology; and the Lowell Public Schools, among other schools, colleges and universities in New England and New York.
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 This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DUE 0302548. |
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