Lottery tuition assistance critical to workforce

Developing South Carolina’s workforce is a vital part of what the 16 technical colleges of the S.C. Technical College System do daily.

To illustrate, last year the BMW facility in Spartanburg produced more than 400,000 vehicles. Charleston’s Boeing facility produced 12 Dreamliners a month, and our many tire manufacturers across the state manufactured more than 100,000 tires a day. Those are some staggering numbers for a state the size of South Carolina.

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To produce these statistics, a workforce complete with skilled, ready workers must be in place. That is where the Technical College System’s role becomes critical. Often in two years or less, South Carolinians can earn the credentials they need at one of our technical colleges to take advantage of these high-demand, high-tech and high-paying jobs in our state. In many cases, the lottery tuition assistance program makes these careers possible by creating an affordable, accessible pathway.

South Carolina’s technical colleges serve more of South Carolina’s undergraduates than all the other public colleges and universities combined. In fact, 57 percent of all South Carolinians enrolled as undergraduates in one of our state’s public colleges attend one of our 16 colleges. Our colleges provide a gateway to higher education through geographic accessibility, course flexibility and financial affordability. Nearly 30 percent of technical college students rely on lottery scholarships to achieve their academic and career goals.

Since the lottery’s inception, nearly 308,000 individual students have benefited from the lottery tuition assistance program, which is critical to our students and ensures that a high-quality higher education remains affordable and accessible.

The program enhances the employability of South Carolina’s citizens and works to build the highly skilled workforce pipeline essential to sustaining our state’s economy.

This story was originally published April 15, 2017 at 4:11 PM with the headline "Lottery tuition assistance critical to workforce."