(File Photo of the Community College of Beaver County Logo)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Monaca, PA) The Community College of Beaver County recently received $473,491 in National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education program grant funds for CCBC to both train the next generation of professionals in cybersecurity and to expand their STEM programs. According to a release from the Community College of Beaver County, specifically, this three-year grant will fund CCBC’s ACCESS: Creating Pathways to Advance Cybersecurity Career Education for STEM Success program to accomplish these goals, and here are the things that the ACCESS project will do: 

• Ensure underserved youths have access to high quality STEM education to speed up their entry
  into careers. Building from its successful high school academy model, CCBC will launch a new
  Cybersecurity High School Academy this fall.
• Provide opportunities for peer tutoring, employment as teaching assistants, need-based
  stipends, and vouchers to pay for textbooks and certification exams.
• Prepare students to directly enter the workforce or continue their training and provide low-to-cost workforce development for alumni, cyber professionals, community college faculty, and K-12 educators through a Penetration Testing Pro-Series.

12 community colleges, one of them being the Community College of Beaver County got accepted to the FORCE-ATE workshop for mentoring in June of 2024 to pursue an Advanced Technological Education grant to make more accessibility to educational pathways that are diverse for cybersecurity for students interested in that field coming from high school to that workforce. The academic plan from the Community College of Beaver County called Titan Pathways to Success aligns with a project involving directly addressing the critical cybersecurity workforce shortage of the United States.