Microsoft fellow looks at preparing the AI workforce, one community college at a time

As a 17-year-old in rural Texas, Sarah L. Rodriguez earned a full-ride Gates Millennium Scholarship that funded her through a decade of higher education, thanks to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. 

So it was a bit of a full-circle moment when Rodriguez, now associate professor of engineering education at Virginia Tech, recently was awarded a senior fellowship from the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, an initiative of the AI for Good Lab focused on adapting to an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven world. 

As one of only 17 fellows selected worldwide, Rodriguez will explore how U.S. community colleges are preparing students to thrive in a rapidly evolving AI ecosystem through programs, policy, and strategic partnerships.

An estimated 43 percent of American undergraduates are enrolled at a community college. Microcredentials, certificate programs, and other programming make community colleges a vital entry point for workforce development as AI reshapes careers across regions.

“We’re focused on understanding AI workforce development across U.S. community colleges and considering regional and contextualized influences,” Rodriguez said, noting that as a corporation, Microsoft needs an AI-fluent workforce itself. “Microsoft wants the best, the brightest, the most innovative, and they want it tomorrow — or they want it yesterday, actually.”

'The MVPs' of higher education

Rodriguez’s work was perfectly aligned with a call to understand how higher education responds to an economy transformed and disrupted by AI.

A long-time community college advocate and scholar, she’s partnered for the past five years with Florida's Miami Dade College — with over 174,000 students, the largest community college in the country — to assist with expanding AI readiness. The new project builds on prior research by leveraging the National Applied Artificial Intelligence Consortium network platform to inform AI workforce strategies and policy solutions.

As a former community college student herself, the work is personal for Rodriguez. “I really believe that community colleges are the MVPs of all higher education," she said. "They already understand how to do things quickly and how to do it at scale and do it really well.”

A global fellowship

As part of the second cohort of Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute, Rodriguez will receive a $82,500 seed gift for her research. More importantly, she’ll join a global group of collaborators from Nigeria, Chile, and elsewhere, who will meet in virtual sessions weekly as well as attend an in-person workshop at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in March.

Participants also will participate in a policy workshop next summer — a highlight for Rodriguez, who hopes that the work can go beyond the theoretical to influence practice and policy.

“One of the things Microsoft wants to do is position us in places and spaces where we can share out our findings and collaborate worldwide around AI policy,” Rodriguez said. “That's something that's really important to me. My desire in all of this is thinking about STEM policy and how we are scaling across institutions, states, nations, and the world to be able to meet these AI needs.”

Collaborating with a Hokie

Another full-circle moment in the Microsoft AI research is that Rodriguez is collaborating with Malle Schilling Ph.D. ’24, an alum of the Department of Engineering Education who’s now an assistant professor of engineering education systems and design at Arizona State University.

“I think working with Sarah is a testament to how Virginia Tech’s engineering education faculty value the relationships they build with Ph.D. students and invest in the success of Ph.D. alumni, and how these relationships evolve into becoming colleagues while you're in the program and beyond,” Schilling said. “Ultimately, it's been really rewarding to learn and work together.”