San Diego — As the annual meeting of the Association of Community College Trustees got under way here today, a session about how colleges can help high-tech companies remain on the cutting edge featured some predictable advice: Companies need more students to major in mathematics and the sciences.
But the session also offered something new: the example of a fledgling program that has shown signs of working. The Life Science Summer Institute in San Diego puts high-school, community-college, and university students through a two-week boot camp run by San Diego Miramar College. The students are then sent off to internships at local life-science companies to give them a taste of the field.
High-school teachers also can intern through the program to gain more knowledge about the industry. They are then expected to apply that experience to what they teach in the classroom.
In the program’s three-year history, about 100 students and 50 teachers have participated. Those teachers, in turn, have reached about 4,000 students, according to Joe Panetta, president and chief executive of Biocom, a life-sciences trade association that helps with the institute.
The institute, Mr. Panetta says, has increased interest in math and science among students, and it costs only about $250,000 a year. But like many good programs, he says, the institute is at risk of shutting down. The federal grant that supports it runs out this year. —Elyse Ashburn
