Austin Community College ― a semiconductor workforce training leader in Central Texas that has been recognized with federal grants secured by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and gifts from major manufacturers NXP and Samsung ― is partnering with other companies to share its semiconductor training curriculum nationally, officials announced Wednesday.
“We’re about Central Texas, but we’re about to be central to the country and the world,” ACC Chancellor Lowery-Hart said. “A world that the CHIPS Act and semiconductor work is reimagining.”
With America’s Frontier Fund, the workforce development nonprofit Merit America and the Texas Institute for Electronics, ACC is part of the Opportunity Coalition that will offer the college’s Advanced Manufacturing Production training program nationally at no up-front cost. The new initiative will help low-wage workers around the country transition to high-demand advanced manufacturing jobs through quick-turn programs.
The program will first be piloted at Temple College and Central Texas College, Lowery-Hart said, and it then will expand to Arizona, New Mexico and Ohio. The pilot program, which is sponsored by the Dell Foundation, will launch in January with the goal of expanding nationally next fall, said Garrett Groves, ACC vice chancellor for strategic initiatives.
The coalition hopes to reach 20,000 learners and drive wage-gains of $2 billion total by 2030, ACC said in a news release, which will in turn help meet the country’s growing workforce needs as manufacturing grows in the U.S.
“Today is exciting, because we’re talking about what is going to happen. The power is when we change lives because of what we’ve launched today,” Lowery-Hart said.
More:How UT and Austin Community College are helping tackle semiconductor workforce needs
Semiconductor chips power electronics from phones and cars to weapons. The recent move to bolster this industry domestically stems from a bipartisan federal effort to ensure the country’s national security and self-reliance in a crucial industry and boost economic development. The CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022, devoted about $280 billion to expand research and domestic manufacturing, and it has been a significant agent of change locally.
Central Texas has attracted significant manufacturing industry growth, but a Workforce Solutions report last year showed there are “significant shortages” in manufacturing technicians — a job that requires more than a high school degree but less than a four-year college degree — in the Austin metro area due to its rapid growth. At the Wednesday news conference, Mayor Kirk Watson said the new partnership will help anyone in Austin access manufacturing jobs with family-sustaining wages, as well as “set a new standard for how cities can harness the power of technology and innovation to shape a better world.”
“If we address the CHIPS Act and what’s going on in the industry the right way, if we approach this opportunity the way we should approach this opportunity, Austin and Central Texas will be the center of the universe,” Watson said. “That’s what people around the country are expecting will happen.”
With the new program, in a month, a low-wage worker could “double” their salary, said Jordan Blashek, president of America’s Frontier Fund.
Connor Diemand-Yauman, the co-CEO of Merit America, shared a story of a woman, Lily, who increased her salary from $17 an hour to $48 after technician training, a wage that allowed her to buy a home and support her family.
“There are about 70 million folks like Lily in this country, low-wage workers who are stuck in dead-end jobs with no real opportunities for upward mobility,” he said. “If we are able to bring together a world-class curriculum, world-class coaching and financing, we can help folks like Lily make their American dream a reality.”
How ACC became a semiconductor training specialist
ACC, the partners said, represents the gold standard for curriculum. Blashek said the investment platform and Merit America, who are leading the coalition, united a year ago with the goal of creating a national training program to help bolster the semiconductor workforce and help lift families out of low-paying jobs.
“Every single person we talked to said, ‘You have to go talk to ACC,'” Blashek said.
Lowery-Hart said it is ACC’s connection with workforce partners what makes its curriculum so strong. He said the new partnership integrates multiple Austin resources and will be transformative for the region.
“The world that’s in front of us with automation and robotics and science and AI and semiconductor manufacturing is going to require us to align and to work together in ways that we haven’t had to do before, and we’re doing it, and that’s what excites me the most,” Lowery-Hart said.
Groves added that ACC’s experience, expertise and employer partnerships make the college a “huge asset” nationally.
“The need is immense, but Austin is one of the only places that has been doing this for 10 years,” Groves said. “We are the internal training provider for these companies. That’s something that it seems no other place in the country has been able to build at the scale that we’ve built.”
Alyssa Reinhart, director of Texas Institute for Electronics, a University of Texas-sponsored semiconductor consortium, called the Opportunity Coalition a “powerful commitment” to address worker shortages. UT and ACC are building a Semiconductor Training Center that will provide hands-on programming for Central Texas students, she said, and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s $840 million grant to the Texas Institute for Electronics to develop a semiconductor microelectronic center for the U.S. Defense Department will provide opportunities for further upskilling in high demand fields. (ACC was awarded $7.5 million as one of the partner institutions, the only community college partner tapped to help.)
“Above all, this is about people,” she added.
Barbara Mink, a founder of the ACC district who is leaving the college’s board after 24 years of service, said this is the kind of effect the school always intended to have.
“What Austin Community College does is it responds to community needs,” Mink said. “We have gone from 1,800 students to 70,000 plus with 11 campuses. … There was never a doubt that Austin Community College was going to be something to economic and social equity issues of Central Texas.”
