Why Rural and CTE Programs Need Their Own Approach
- Page ID
- 69786
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Rural community colleges serve as workforce development hubs in ways larger institutions often do not. A September 2025 opinion piece in The Hechinger Report, written by Bonita Robertson-Hardy and Josh Wyner of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, argues that rural colleges can function as rural development hubs that bridge economic, social, and civic sectors to address regional challenges. Our programs prepare students for jobs. They also shape whether those jobs exist in our communities at all.
Career and Technical Education sits at the center of that mission. By estimates from Jobs for the Future based on federal data, CTE programs graduate more than 1.3 million people a year with industry-aligned skills, and an Advance CTE national survey found that 93% of employers who recruit from CTE programs report a positive impact on their bottom line. But CTE also faces its own AI questions. How do you integrate AI into welding instruction when the real skill is reading a puddle? How do you use AI in paramedic training without eroding the split-second judgment that saves lives? How do you prepare nursing students for AI-assisted diagnostics while making sure they can function when the system fails?
This guide takes on those questions directly, drawing on our faculty’s experience and the research specific to workforce education.