California State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and nearby Hartnell College in Salinas, CA teamed up to initiate one of the country’s most innovative Computer Science Cohort programs. Since 2013 the two institutions, have promoted this program as a way to attract minorities, women and students who are the first in their families to attend college to Computer Science and STEM subjects. The Cohort program nurtures these students by having them take their CS classes as a group. It also helps them adjust more quickly to college life by providing them with group study and life skills classes to help them stick with CS as a major and graduate. So far, so good. A 75% majority of students enrolled in the CSUMB/Hartnell CS Cohort program graduate. This is well above the national average of about 30%. The program is the brainchild of Sathya Narayana a CS professor at CSUMB, who constructed it with Joe Welch and Sonia Arteaga, his counterparts at Hartnell, a two-year community college in Salinas, CA. Read my article on this important initiative at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Website here: http://bit.ly/2yCrdTr