The SME Education Foundation works to inspire, prepare and support an advanced manufacturing workforce through education. Through building awareness of opportunity, enhancing academic opportunity and directly helping students at every level, the SME Education Foundation works to offer students a path to explore, learn and grow in fields associated with manufacturing.
Created by SME in 1979, the SME Education Foundation has provided more than $33 million since 1980 in grants, scholarships and awards in the U.S. and Canada and supported student outreach programs through its partnerships with corporations, foundations, organizations and individual donors.
SME Education Foundation’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategy is designed to fully integrate diversity and equity opportunities in every program, effort and initiative undertaken by the foundation over the next five years.
Learn how the SME Education Foundation advances manufacturing education through our Student Summit event series, SME PRIME initiative and Student Scholarship program.
A newly established scholarship fund for students in underrepresented communities is a crucial component of the SME Education Foundation’s diversity, equity and inclusion strategy, designed to fully integrate diversity and equity opportunities in every program, effort and initiative undertaken by the foundation over the next five years.
Valerie Freeman, a manufacturing and robotics pathway teacher at Park High School, will join the SME Education Foundation Board of Directors in 2021. Park High School in Racine Unified School District joined the SME PRIME school network in 2017. Freeman was instrumental in utilizing SME PRIME to install new curriculum, training to teach students important skills like how to program a robotic arm and remodeling the classroom for a more effective learning environment.
The Arconic Foundation donated $25,000 to the SME Education Foundation’s COVID-19 campaign. Donations to the campaign will ensure that online learning provided by Tooling U-SME becomes available to thousands of high school students in 12 manufacturing disciplines, including additive manufacturing, mechatronics and smart manufacturing.
Industry 4.0 ushered in new technologies, new products and new ways of working. It's imperative that high schools keep pace with the skills they teach students to prepare them for the manufacturing workforce. SME PRIME schools give manufacturing students a head start, as they inspire them to use and test the skills they learn in the classroom during regular class projects as well as occasional special assignments.
The SME Education Foundation awarded 222 scholarships totaling nearly $550,000 to graduating high school seniors, undergraduates and graduate students currently or planning to attend colleges, universities across the United States and Canada.