As South Dakota technical colleges celebrate the 10th anniversary of providing Build Dakota scholarships to students, college leaders know there’s a need for additional workforce out there.
Their goal is to get 3,001 Build Dakota scholarship graduates by the year 2030, and they’re between 2,600 and 2,700 now, Southeast Technical College President Cory Clasemann told Rotarians at a Monday meeting at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance.
Clasemann said more than a dozen programs were at their maximum capacity this fall and had waitlists. High need fields of study this year were agriculture, automotive and diesel, building trades and construction, energy technicians, engineering technicians, health care, IT and computer information systems, precision manufacturing, public service and welding.
New programs at STC included in the scholarship this year are early childhood, powersports, medical assistant, dental hygienist and entrepreneurship.
“We know we need to continue to have more students in our programs,” Clasemann said. “We’d love to have more Build Dakota scholarship students… We need to figure out, how can we continue to grow to meet the needs of the city?”
He said STC is fundraising for an expansion and renovation of its trades building on campus, and hopes to break ground on the first phase of construction next year, allowing the college to grow enrollment in building and construction programs.
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“For a city this size, Southeast Tech needs to continue to grow,” Clasemann said. “We need to be bigger than what we are to continue to meet the needs of the city.”
More than 3,900 Build Dakota scholarships have been awarded since the program started 10 years ago, including 612 total this year. Each school awards about $1.3 million to $1.5 million each year. This year, the technical college system reached almost $5 million in industry partnerships.
Adam Joachim, 22, a Build Dakota scholarship recipient and STC graduate who’s now a superintendent at SFC Civil Constructors, said after his junior year of high school in Corsica, he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He worked at Journey Group over that summer, then heard about the Build Dakota scholarship and asked the human resources manager if they’d sponsor him for the scholarship.
“It’s been a great opportunity,” Joachim said. “I’m really thankful.”
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Joachim recently closed on his first home, to the applause and congratulations of many of the Rotarians in attendance at Monday’s discussion. He said for anyone considering technical education or a career in the trades, “there’s a huge need for it, and there’s demand. There’s money there to be made.”
Dana Dykhouse, president of the South Dakota Board of Technical Education and chair of the Build Dakota scholarship board, said many of the people who’ve worked with the Build Dakota program “would say we have done a terrible disservice to the young people of our state, and I think of our nation, of telling everyone to have a four-year degree if you’re going to succeed.”
“Compare that to Adam’s situation,” he said.
He noted the low percentage of South Dakota high school graduates that complete high school but don’t go on to higher education. That’s 40%, according to the state’s latest report card.
“If we want our communities to survive and thrive, it’s that (40%) we need to target and get them to that next level of education, that next level of skill development,” Dykhouse said.
Clasemann said he can’t overstate the importance of the Build Dakota scholarship to technical education and to students and the state in general.
“Now, at a time where we have over a trillion dollars in student debt outstanding in this country, the ability to be able to go to college, have everything paid for, graduate debt-free and have a job waiting for you at the end, and a partner in the industry who is just ready to help you and walk beside you the entire way, is just absolutely phenomenal,” he said.
