Century Awarded $1.5 Million Department of Education Grant

White Bear Lake, MN – Century College was recently awarded nearly $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Asian American, Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Program. 

The College will receive $300,000 each year for 5 years to focus on career and technical education for students from Hmong, Karin, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrant backgrounds.  The College serves large populations of students from Southeast Asian refugee communities.

Century College will implement three strategies to achieve the grant goals:

• Train faculty in culturally-relevant teaching and student engagement methods to better connect students to the learning process.
• Implement outreach initiatives and collaborative work with select K-12 schools and community organizations to better serve students.
• Offer supplemental tutoring, career guidance, financial literacy, and augmented English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) supports.

The overall goal of the project is to improve enrollment, retention, and graduation rates of Asian, Pacific Islander, impoverished and other disadvantaged students.