NSF’s Impact on Community Colleges and the Skilled Technical Workforce: An interview with Dr. Celeste Carter

In recent months, media narratives, policy debates, and advocacy rallies have emphasized the role of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in funding scientific research, technological innovation, and high-skilled STEM talent that powers domestic economic development, national security, and global competitiveness. Indeed, these are legitimate and important reasons why Congress should increase and strengthen the agency’s budget rather than cut it.

But the NSF’s value proposition to Americans extends far beyond supporting universities through research and education funding. For decades, the NSF has played an irreplaceable role in supporting America’s 1,000+ community colleges in preparing a vibrant, skilled technical workforce–STEM workers who need more than a high school education but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree.

More than half of America’s 37 million STEM workers are skilled technical workers. They power our industries of today and tomorrow and are also a bedrock of America’s middle class. NSF’s support of skilled technical workforce education is critical for the economy.

Central to that work has been NSF’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program. For more than thirty years, NSF ATE has granted over 600 community colleges a combined $1.5 billion since 1994.

This June, New America’s Future of Work & Innovation Economy (FOWIE) initiative and the American Association of Community Colleges held a joint briefing with the Congressional R&D Caucus on Capitol Hill to help lawmakers better understand ATE and the NSF’s overall underappreciated impact on community college students.

Few leaders better understand NSF’s work with community colleges than Dr. Celeste Carter. From 2009 to 2025, she led the NSF ATE program, guiding its mission to strengthen the nation’s STEM technician workforce. Before her appointment as lead program director, Dr. Carter served as an NSF rotator, drawing on her firsthand experience from the community college sector, where she pioneered and directed the first biotechnology and bioinformatics programs at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California.

Dr. Carter recently retired from the NSF and joined New America as a 2025 FOWIE Fellow, where she will support New America’s ongoing research, storytelling, and policy innovation to improve and harmonize science, workforce, and industrial policies and their implementation at colleges and in communities.

To commemorate her many years of service to NSF, the nation’s community colleges and America’s skilled technical workforce, and as a welcome to New America, we sat down to gain her wisdom and perspective on the value of NSF and ATE.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

To start off, tell us the story of how you got to NSF to lead the NSF ATE program.

The simple answer would be the biotechnology network developed through the ATE program. I was the recipient of an ATE grant award in 1997, Cases in Industry Practice in Biotechnology, and the Biotechnology Center (BioLink) Director, Dr. Elaine Johnson, developed a robust community of practice.

When Dr. Johnson heard that the ATE program needed a 2-year biotechnology faculty, she called me and urged me to contact Dr. Duncan McBride in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). That led to two rounds serving as a rotating program officer in DUE, as a program officer on the ATE team, as well as other NSF programs. In 2008, Dr. Elizabeth Teles, who was then leading the ATE program, announced her retirement and encouraged me to apply for the permanent program officer position in DUE with the role of ATE program lead.

I did apply and was offered the job in 2009. I have been the lead program officer for the ATE program from 2009 to 2025.

In your long tenure as the ATE program director, what impact testimonials stand out to you? What are the stories you wish more people knew of?

This is a hard question as there are so many impact testimonials. I would start with students. Dr. Kapil Madathil is a tenured faculty with an endowed chair at Clemson University. He recently brought a photo from a past ATE Principal Investigators’ (PI) conference where he received a certificate acknowledging his participation at the conference as a student.

He has continued to support the education of the skilled technical workforce throughout his career. I also remember a student roundtable where one young woman introduced herself as not only the first person in her family to attend college, but also the first person in her family to attend high school. She was studying automotive technology in Kentucky and was receiving multiple job offers from automotive companies in the region. The ATE program has impacted hundreds of thousands of students and each one has a unique story.

The ATE program has also impacted faculty. So many faculty have told me they were considering leaving teaching, but the ATE community and the projects they led provided them with a renewed incentive to stay in the classroom and laboratory. Some faculty have moved, but moved into industry, Manufacturing USA Institutes, and other positions where they continued impacting workforce development policies and activities.

Finally, institutions that have received ATE awards have become drivers of economic development in their regions due to the close industry partnerships, and administrators have worked to develop a grants culture at many 2-year institutions that had never considered the impact such a culture could have on their institutions.

ATE supports a variety of skilled technician education programs, but those programs can only flourish if a college has the right internal infrastructure, policies, processes, and culture. From your experiences with ATE, what sets up a community college at the institutional level to be successful in educating technicians for the skilled technical workforce?

Institutions that have both a top-down and bottom-up culture move seamlessly into the ATE community. Innovative faculty who are life-long learners and look for opportunities to expand opportunities for their students are essential, but the administrators also need to be forward thinking as they look at the student population entering their campuses as well as the economic outlook in their region.

The strategic plan for the institution is important in supporting the forward-thinking administrators and faculty, and this plan can provide the impetus for faculty to follow emerging areas and industry needs in the region.

But, 2-year institutions have very diverse populations of students in terms of their immediate goals, ranging from enrolling in a ceramics class for general interest to students seeking to transfer to complete a 4-year degree to students who want to gain the skills and competencies needed to move into the workforce.

For robust technician education programs to flourish, both administrators and faculty need to be in alignment, and the faculty need to be supported in reaching out to industry to establish partnerships that support all parties.

The NSF is facing significant upheaval at the moment. You recently attended a joint briefing held by New America and AACC, urging lawmakers to drop plans to cut the NSF’s budget and its support to community colleges. Several NSF ATE faculty leaders and community college presidents have also spoken out against these cuts. In your view, what differentiates ATE from workforce funding at other agencies that warrant continued investment from Congress?

Other workforce programs have and do support workforce projects, but the ATE program is much more than a set of funded projects. From the inception of the program following the passage and signing into law of the 1992 Scientific and Advanced Technology Act (SATA), the NSF ATE lead Program Directors have worked with funded faculty, institutions, industry partners, and professional associations to develop a community of practice in educating the skilled technical workforce.

The partnership with AACC has been and continues to be of critical importance to the ATE program. AACC worked to support the development and passage of the 1992 SATA, and has continued to support ATE in all aspects of the program. AACC brings the awardees together at the Annual ATE Principal Investigators (PI) Conference, orchestrates and runs the Community College Innovation Challenge, and convenes groups from faculty to policymakers to ensure ATE stays at the cutting edge of education in emerging areas and areas where industry needs change due to technological changes.

The entire ATE community is robust and active in working together to support industry needs and provide students with programs that provide them with the knowledge, skills, and competencies identified by industry.

There is cross-fertilization of best practices across all of the technological areas supported through the program, and ATE principal investigators and project staff reach out across institutions and agencies.

One example is the involvement of the ATE community with the Department of Labor’s Competency Models. ATE PIs are actively engaged in developing and modifying these competency models in response to emerging areas and where industry has modified the KSAs needed by the skilled technical worker.

The ATE community also mentors prospective PIs and administrators to increase the involvement of 2-year institutions in the program. Mentees have stated that without this community support, they would not have been confident in submitting a proposal to the ATE program.

To close out, from all the lessons you have learned leading ATE, what’s one underrated idea in skilled technical workforce education at community colleges?

While the ATE program requires and supports industry-education partnerships, I would like to see even more involvement of industry in the education of the skilled technical worker.

Finding faculty in some of the technological areas is difficult for some 2-year institutions and others are finding their faculty leaving to go into industry, as the salaries are generally much higher in industry. It would be interesting to find ways to further engage industry scientists in the education of students.

This might include industry scientists teaching short evening courses at the 2-year institution or team-teaching of courses to ensure that students have the opportunity to engage with industry scientists as they learn about the industry and gain skills and competencies in a given technological area. One example of team-teaching is found in the ATE award, Improving Advanced Manufacturing Technician Education Using Industry Partnerships at Central Virginia Community College.

Another idea is to ensure ATE programs stay at the cutting edge of industry with regular convenings of industry and the ATE community. These would have industry speaking to their views on where the field is moving and how they envision skills and workforce needs changing. This has been done with AACC convening the biotechnology industry, and the 2009 publication from that convening is still relevant. These convenings are of particular relevance to the emerging industries, including robotics, AI, and Industry 5.0.