Adjacent Academies: Preparing College Students Today with Technology of Tomorrow
Adjacent Academies is a program that allows college students who are embarking on a liberal arts degree to get hands-on experience in the technology field. The program allows these students to earn college credit at the same time. Led by Rethink Education, the startup recently raised $2.1 million seed for the program.
The program is built off of the pilot program that was launched at Davidson College and four other liberal arts-based colleges. Studies are finding that employers value the liberal arts degree patrons because they offer the skills that they are looking for most often in applicants. These skills include leadership and innovation, but the downside is that these graduates face unemployment because they cannot compete with those in their fields who also have technical skills on top of their liberal arts degrees.
The Adjacent Academies program builds from the soft skills taught in the liberal arts field and enhances it with technologically advanced and hands-on training with such platforms as JavaScript. The 2019 pilot program was even able to visit locations like Slack and LinkedIn.
These visits allow the students to see the atmosphere and demand for their skills in a true startup situation. This program will allow the students to not only have the liberal arts degrees that they require for the business side of things, but the skills and knowledge to excel in the tech side.
Colleges are under the pressure or helping their students find jobs. This can be through employment placing services provided by the college, or just making sure that they have the education that is required to make sure that they are ready to not only work but adapt to the real-life situations that they will face once they are no longer in the protective college setting.
The goal of Adjacent Academies is to help unlock the potential of the human mind in an economy that is driven by knowledge.
