The first cohort of students to enroll in Northern Virginia Community College’s associate cloud computing degree, launched with Amazon Web Services in 2018, were predominantly students of color.
Chad Knights, NOVA’s vice president of IET and college computing, said Monday during AWS’ “IMAGINE: Education” conference that between 65% and 70% of the program’s first class of students, now in their final year, are diverse, at least in terms of race and ethnicity.
But NOVA has struggled to attract women to its cloud computing degree program, Knights said. The community college recently launched a speaker series for women in IT as one step to boost female participation in, and attention to, the program.
“Where we fell down was on the gender field. The gender field was really disproportionate,” Knights said on a panel about Amazon’s cloud computing arm’s partnerships with degree programs at NOVA and George Mason University. “We are still focused keenly on both and trying to identify…
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