25,000 students in the Phoenix metro area were impacted by nearly 400 Teach for America corps members in the 2007-08 school year.
ASU is a network that invites and empowers.
ASU has transformed its community. ASU hired new faculty across the disciplines. ASU reached out to create more access to education for more students. ASU partnered with communities to deeply embed the university within its surroundings. And ASU has looked beyond national boundaries to engage with global partners.
Community means collaboration
For ASU, this is all part of redefining who our community is. Communities have specific knowledge and on-the-ground resources. Communities help to drive discovery and solutions. Everybody in the state and beyond is a potential partner in, potential beneficiary of, and potential contributor to solutions for the future.
Access has trumped elitism
At ASU, redefining community also means drawing new groups of students into higher education. First generation college students are enrolling at ASU from all over the region, and ASU has built structures and programs to support students and the communities to which they are connected.
The success of students, both during their education and after they leave the institution, is one of ASU’s highest priorities.
Read More
Access has trumped elitism
ASU works with communities in a variety of ways. In a collaboration with tribal stakeholders, ASU is building educational programs that are relevant to the issues faced by American Indian communities. Economic and infrastructure disparities in Indian Country remain enormous. For example, tribal lands continue to have limited access to basic utilities, with nearly a sixth of Indian households lacking electricity altogether.
Students need to find courses and programs at ASU that recognize where they come from and allow them to tailor an education to meet their needs. As a result, ASU students, faculty and staff innovate constantly. For example, a student project grew to become “Construction in Indian Country,” an annual conference that improves construction management within American Indian nations and provides valuable educational opportunities to American Indian construction students. The conference brings in hundreds of attendees annually, one-quarter of them from other states. The substantial proceeds from the conference contribute to an endowment benefitting American Indian students in ASU’s Del E. Webb School of Construction.
It’s this kind of community-driven program that makes an ASU education relevant for many different people. ASU combines these programs with intensive outreach efforts to communities around the state in order to support students and families as they make the decision to go to college.
Through the Sun Devil Promise, the university collaborates with school districts to make sure that thousands of qualified Arizona students are familiar with the university and know what they need to do to get in. Club ASU connects young students to ASU. The American Dream Academy helps instill the value of education in parents and their children. And the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program raises the educational and career aspirations of women.
