In our “Focus on” series, WorkingNation takes you to cities and towns around the country to share the ideas and efforts that are creating jobs and giving opportunity for family-sustaining jobs and economic mobility. In this article in the series, we Focus on Tempe, Arizona.
Education, health care, and skilled trades are just a few of the job sectors that are seeing tremendous growth in Tempe, Arizona.
“The sky’s the limit here. I see so much opportunity when I get out of bed and come down to my office. I see a wonderful group of people in this community who really want to see us continue to march forward,” says Mayor Corey Woods.
With a population of about 200,000, he says, “We are continuing to grow each and every day.” Tempe’s population is expected to grow 38% by 2060, according to projections by the Maricopa Association of Governments.
Strong Educational Presence
Woods was sworn in for his second mayoral term at the beginning of this month, a role he was first elected to in 2020. Prior to taking on the city’s leadership, he was a member of the City Council for eight years.
“Education is obviously huge in the city of Tempe. We’ve got Arizona State University (ASU), the nation’s largest public university right in our backyard. We graduate tons of people with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees,” notes Woods.
He continues, “We’re between two other major cities – Phoenix, which is directly to our west, which is now the fifth largest city in the country and Mesa directly to our east. So, we’re very well positioned, geographically, but also with the university and with the Maricopa Community Colleges system.”
Enhanced Learning and Inclusivity
In March, ASU’s Learning Engineering Institute (LEI) received a new grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Woods says about the $3.75 million, three-year, renewable funding, “Really, it’s to try to find ways to work with AI. But the whole point is to find ways to create opportunities for learners and to grow, not just the city of Tempe’s workforce, but Arizona’s workforce in general.
“We know…our BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, people of color communities, women will benefit from this program. Folks coming from a lower socioeconomic scale will benefit from the program.”
“Learning engineering is the melding of multiple disciplines to enhance learning for students. It goes under the principle that learning sciences have evolved quite a bit,” says Danielle McNamara, Ph.D. – who among her various ASU roles – is executive director of LEI.
McNamara explains, “I’ve been working on tutoring technologies that have leveraged AI, that teach students reading and writing strategies. What this grant does is it takes the approach of encouraging and prompting students to actively process information into an environment that is mobile that they can take anywhere.
“In this modern world, we are not always sitting at home with a textbook or even with a computer. Some students only have iPhones in many parts of our world. And the app that we are partnering with called INFLO allows you to not only listen to content like an audio book, but also interact with it. What we’re building is an AI that will interact and give feedback on things like explanations and summaries.”
McNamara notes, “Because we [ASU] are so huge and serve a diverse population of students of all ages, we’re able to build it out and test it at scale. It’s active learning at-scale across multiple contexts within the university. Then as we move forward, we’ll test it in multiple institutions. This portion of the grant is really focused on building it.”
LEI already conducted pilot studies prior to the latest grant funding, so some Psych 101 students have access to the app this summer. McNamara explains, “We’re providing access to the lecture portion. So really looking at the usability of it. Not really does it work – but do students use it? How do they use it?
“On the other side, we’re working toward how to integrate those algorithms that are AI-driven and that involves multiple components.”
Workforce Pathways
“What we’re really thinking deeply about is how to access the pathway through the university to the needs of the workforce. How can we think about what the workforce needs? What credentials do they need? How do we facilitate that through the university?”
McNamara points out that this technology has implications for younger learners, as well. “We’re thinking about how to help K-12 students have better access in Arizona to higher ed, and then how to continue that through to the workforce.
“[Regarding] bringing workforce back into upskilling and reskilling – one of our biggest impediments to personalize learning is time. So time-based semester courses are just not feasible for many learners and, in particular, if you are working. One thing is chunkable learning experiences. How do we have learning experiences in the amount of time that learners actually have to learn?”
Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program
Another ASU effort – the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program (HMDP) – has been in place for 40 years. HMDP “is an early-outreach middle and high school program designed to increase the number of first-generation Arizona students who are qualified and prepared to enroll at Arizona State University through direct family involvement.”
“The Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program has been longstanding at ASU,” says Woods. “I know plenty of people who’ve actually gone through the program and talked about how absolutely lifechanging it was.”
“The heart of it is really our belief through practice and later research that involving a family in a student’s academic success is really critical, particularly in the communities that we serve,” says Alejandro Perilla, director of Access ASU’s programs and initiatives – which oversees HMDP among other programs.
He says, “We actually show the parents and the students what it’s like to be at a university. They’re required to come twice a year to the university where they will participate in a workshop.
“This is in a real university classroom with a real university professor. And when they start, we give them a syllabus, ‘Here’s your syllabus.’ ‘What’s a syllabus?’ ‘Oh, it’s this piece of paper that’s going to tell you what’s going to happen during the rest of the semester.’ You can’t do more than actually show people what they’re going to experience at some point because they’re living it. They’re living it today.”
Perilla continues, “Most of the schools that partner with us are Title I schools, which means they’re serving low-income, minority students. At the end of the day, those are the students that we want to attract to Arizona State University because we serve the entire demographic of the state. And so, serving minority students of all kinds is something we feel the need to do, and we try to do it well.”
Among the 3,500 – 4,000 people who have gone through HMDP is past participant Marcela Lopez – who, in middle school, was sent home with the program paperwork.
Lopez – who was in seventh grade at the time – says, “You get something, you just shove it in the backpack. A counselor called my mom and said, ‘I sent a package with Marcela. I haven’t received it, but I really think she’s college bound.’ At that point, we were still in a process of legally receiving residency here, and I just didn’t know if that was a possibility for me or what that may look like.”
Lopez recounts the conversation she had with her mother before she interviewed for the program, “I said, ‘Why are we going? You don’t speak English. We’re going to be driving to ASU.’ And she said, ‘I just know that I need you to go to college and I need to start somewhere. This what the American dream means for us.’
“That’s how HMDP started for me. Back then, it was a 10-year commitment. It was my eighth grade, four years of high school, college, and then one year post-college. I felt like 10 years felt like a very long time, but she never missed a session with me – even on her tired days because she cleaned homes.”
Lopez recalls there were emotional aspects to her HMDP participation, “I came from a high school where 95% of us were Latinas and starting to understand that as I went into the university, that wasn’t going to be the norm. I was going to be a minority and how important it was for me to earn a college degree.
“And being at ASU, it’s a huge campus, but being in the classroom in a space with my parent there and learning about how this could be my place was very important for me.”
These days, Lopez is the director of family and community engagement for Isaac School District #5. “It’s actually the district that I attended as a student. It’s where I participated in the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program.
“[HMDP] let me find my career path and what I wanted to do. It really sparked in me and filled that bucket of the importance of giving back to my community. I think a lot of the reason why I continue to find myself in these positions that are around education, around advocacy, around first-gen students is because of the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program and the path that they opened – the opportunity to have mentors, to have guidance.”
Perilla notes that, previously, Lopez was hired in his department, “We hired her to come work for ASU, and she left ASU as the executive director of this team. Just the notion that somebody came full circle to me was just fascinating. And she’s a dear friend. I hired her and then she was my boss. Love that, right? Just incredible.”
He points out that the HDMP demographics have expanded over the years, “We continue to serve families. That is our key. We have the mother, the father, the son, or the daughter, because even though it’s Hispanic Mother-Daughter, for all of the right reasons, we can no longer say it’s just a single-sex program or single ethnicity program.”
Woods says, “While we’re all equal, I think it’s important always to acknowledge the differences in those cultural backgrounds in those experiences, and not just expect that we’ve all just done the same things.”
The mayor adds, “As a matter of full transparency, I also have worked for the university for nearly eight years. I work for ASU Preparatory Academy, their K 12 division. I do community relations work, so I’m not on the academic side of things.
“Frankly, I’ve been very excited to have an opportunity to work alongside Dr. Michael Crow [ASU president] and a lot of the initiatives that he has going on. He really has transformed the university and transformed that campus. And so Arizona State University is really all about trying to be on the cutting edge of everything.”
Huge Demand for Skilled Trades Workers
Maricopa County is short 195,000 skilled trades workers, according to David A. Cain, Ph.D., program director of construction management/ trades and architecture at Mesa Community College (MCC).
He says, “Five people are retiring for every two that are taking their place. These are skilled workers I’m talking about. So, there are approximately 10 million skilled jobs that are open up across the United States.
“That’s from the Department of Labor – 10 million job openings that don’t require four-year degrees. For many years there’s been a stigma with blue-collar workers not being as good as white-collar workers. And I think we’re starting to debunk that stereotype.”
Cain notes that some local major projects are behind schedule, “They’re a year or two years behind. There are multiple reasons, but the two major ones are the labor shortage – struggling to find skilled labor. And number two, safety, OSHA requirements, accidents on job sites. So those two issues are really delaying our progress here.
“The governor is on top of it. [Katie Hobbs] has held several conferences, put some money forward for the state to address apprenticeship programs, community colleges addressing the workforce’s need and safety.”
The skilled trades program at MCC includes carpentry, electrical, and plumbing – with masonry and solar being added this year.
Cain explains the construction management program has been in place for some time, but the skilled trades components are fairly new, “We put together – within a year’s time – a comprehensive construction trades program that takes time and energy with people adopting the curriculum, getting our district board to approve it, and then going to the Higher Learning Commission for approval, and then getting people in the right spots to launch it. So
“We’ve been doing it for the last year and a half. Informally, it’s met with great success. The numbers are there for us. We try to keep the enrollment to 1:15 in terms of student learning outcomes. We don’t want a class bigger than 15 just because of the hazard that goes along with teaching the trades.”
Cain says employers are motivated to build the talent pipeline, “They are at the table. They are working with the apprentice programs that we have, the locals that provide carpenters, electricians, plumbers for the workforce. They are at the forefront, but it’s a multidimensional issue and it takes everybody to provide that input and try to solve together.”
He notes, “Our program incorporates the residential aspect of building. It also incorporates commercial building, which are hospitals, malls, and grocery stores, and then industrial, which are the major builds.”
Students go through the program for about a year and, at the end, earn a certificate of completion. Classes are offered in the evenings, because as Cain explains, “Eighty percent of our students already have work, mostly in construction. They’re wanting to up their game, improve their skills, get additional certification.”
Cain says young people are showing interest in the skilled trades, “I’ve been very surprised that this generation is waking up. They understand they can make a six-figure salary if they work hard and they’re not afraid of it.”
But he says the age range of students is anywhere from 18 to 68 years – although, the 68-year-old was not looking for a career. Cain recalls, “He says, ‘I’m tired of paying close to $200 for trades to come to the house to fix things.’
“A lot of minorities are in our program. A lot of women are in our programs. I have a summer class, 50% are students of color, and about a third of them are females.”
‘We cannot do it alone’
Woods says the working relationship between the public and private sectors are crucial to his city, “For me, they’re critical. The fact of the matter is the city does a lot of things. We are in a lot of different areas, but we cannot do it alone.
“We tell people all the time that we need the support of our other public sector partners, of our private sector, nonprofit, faith partners. All these organizations make up the unique fabric and tapestry of what is the city of Tempe. So, from my perspective, we’re going to continue to partner with all of these different organizations.
“As long as we continue marching down the same course, but we also continue to innovate along the way, I think we’re going to do some great things,” reiterates Woods.
WorkingNation producer Deidra White contributed to the reporting for this article.
