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Colleges and universities across the nation have launched numerous initiatives over the past two years—including courses, research projects and strategic plans—to meet the rising demand for an artificial intelligence–ready workforce.
But those offerings can vary widely depending on an institution’s resources and industry connections. It’s a divide leaders of community colleges, which typically serve high proportions of low-income and first-generation students, are acutely aware of and want to change as AI’s popularity soars.
“If the folks in our communities don’t get that information from us or through us, they’ll ultimately be on the back end of the labor advances, cultural advances and technological advances,” said Michael Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) in Ohio, where 71 percent of students are enrolled in technical job training courses this academic year. “We have a moral and ethical responsibility to make sure the masses don’t get left out of the AI revolution.”
While some professors at Tri-C, which serves more than 42,000 students in the Cleveland area, have already introduced AI training into their courses, Baston saw an opportunity to take the college’s AI educational mission one step further by participating in the nonprofit Complete College America’s (CCA) inaugural AI Readiness Consortium, which announced the launch of its first cohort of five two-year institutions on Wednesday.
Over the next several months, Tri-C, Atlanta Metropolitan State College, City Colleges of Chicago, Pikes Peak State College and the City University of New York will collaborate with each other—as well as with numerous businesses and organizations that use AI—to design 25 new courses that will give students the chance to use AI tools to solve real-world problems or create efficiencies. Ideally, those courses will offer a model for other faculty members and community colleges.
“We’re all together on this notion of improving students’ understanding of and use of AI,” Baston said. “How we do it will look differently by faculty cohort and school—AI is used differently in an engineering class than an English class.”
Meeting Employer Demand
But recent job market data shows that no matter which field students pursue, AI readiness will likely give them an edge in a competitive labor market.
According to Microsoft’s 2024 annual work trends report, 66 percent of business leaders said they would not hire someone who does not have AI skills; 71 percent said they would rather hire a less experienced employee with AI skills than a more experienced employee who lacks them.
“We need to grapple with the real potential that AI could make things worse from a student success perspective,” said Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy and advocacy at CCA. “If jobs start getting closed off only to graduates of colleges that are innovative enough to make it in this new economy, then we’re going to see a reduction in career ladders and an increase in wealth gaps down the road.”
While Ansell said it’s too soon to tell exactly who is being left behind in AI education, disparities in institutional resource have historically created uneven access to courses that train students to use the latest technology. A 2023 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research backs that up; it found that colleges with wealthier students are more likely than those with lower-income students to offer courses that incorporate cutting-edge knowledge.
That’s why CCA is investing about $500,000 to help support program costs, including money for supplies, travel, course development and analysis of student outcomes. This spring, select faculty members in various disciplines—including advanced manufacturing, social sciences and allied health—will develop five courses per institution in conjunction with Riipen, a Vancouver-based education-technology start-up and work-based learning platform that allows instructors to embed employer projects directly into classroom instruction.
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The end goal of this collaboration is to create effective AI competency frameworks that other faculty members and colleges may be able to adapt to their courses and student needs.
“We’re trying to show the field that not only is there pent-up demand for this, we’ll also have a lot of answers on how to get this done in the work we learn with these five sites,” Ansell said. “We’ll use that to hopefully figure out funding for more.”
Making Industry Connections
In the meantime, the consortium is working with Riipen to identify the industry partners that will help create meaningful projects for students, including many who may not be able to get a similar learning experience—or networking opportunity—from an employer-sponsored internship.
Of the 8.2 million students who wanted to intern in 2023, close to half—4.6 million—didn’t end up participating, according to a 2024 report from the Business–Higher Education Forum; students of color, along with first-generation, low-income and community college students, had an especially hard time landing internships, which are often unpaid or low-paid commitments taken on in addition to other coursework, jobs and family responsibilities.
By embedding real employer projects into the course content, the consortium aims to remove those barriers.
“No matter what your background is, no matter what your résumé says, everyone in that class will get access to an experience they can put in their portfolio and will get feedback from an industry partner,” Dana Stephenson, co-founder and CEO of Riipen, said. “That social capital–building and professional connections levers them to land more meaningful employment.”