STEAM in the South: A Look at the Blank Family Foundation’s Pipeline Project
Inside Philanthropy
The state of Georgia ranks in the bottom quartile of graduates with two-year and four-year STEM degrees, and only about 15 percent of Georgia graduates took a math or science AP exam. Another statistic that exemplifies the broken STEAM pipeline is broken here is that “of the 32,420 African-American public school students receiving a diploma in Georgia in 2014, only 35 of the students scored 3 or higher on the AP computer science exam.”
It’s easy to get discouraged by how much STEAM education is struggling in the American South, but the good news is that job opportunities are growing for students who can get the training they need to compete with transplant applicants. As a city, Atlanta is growing tremendously in terms of jobs and the tech sector. If local schools here can’t train their own students to be qualified for them, they’ll get snatched right up by new graduates moving down from cities all over the U.S.
