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Aug. 24—GRAND FORKS — University of North Dakota President Andrew Armacost said he doesn’t view the soon-to-open Career Impact Academy as competition to taking in prospective students. Rather, he views it as part of the whole ecosystem of ways to learn.
Alternate learning opportunities for people young and old should be celebrated, he said.
“My stance is that all learning is good learning,” Armacost said. “It’s a great thing for the city of Grand Forks. It’s a great thing for the state of North Dakota. It’s not a competitor to us. It’s a great supplementer of great citizenry that we create together.”
UND is working with other institutions of higher learning as a collaborator, instead of as competition to pull together on workforce development in the state, he said. It is also one of the institutions that will be working with the
Career Impact Academy
, which is planned to open Aug. 28. The academy serves high school and college students, as well as adults, providing training in multiple career-oriented program areas.
During a ribbon-cutting event for the facility, Wayde Sick, director and executive officer of the North Dakota Department of Career and Technical Education, said the CIA will provide access to more diverse career programming and play a role in a “larger strategy” to meet state workforce needs.
Armacost said UND is also constantly asking what employers need from four-year graduates and how it can modify curriculum to give them what they need. As interim committee discussions for higher education begin, there is a focus on what workforce development looks like for two-year schools, four-year schools and the North Dakota University System as a whole.
As a trend toward alternate education and shorter technical degrees grows, UND has also made arrangements with two-year schools to build on students’ learning instead of trying to focus on something the state’s “junior schools” are already good at, he said. UND has “two plus two” programs in place, where a student completes a two-year technical program or liberal arts program and uses it as a basis for a four-year degree. UND will provide a well-rounded four-year education, he said, fostering critical thinking, communication and teamwork.
“UND is a proud contributor to that world, to make sure that our engineers are well-rounded engineers who understand the humanities, social sciences and liberal arts,” Armacost said. “And that our humanists, our liberal arts graduates, are also well-versed in other areas that will make them great contributors.”
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