The coronavirus has been devastating to the residents of Nevada, in both cost of life and livelihood. A result of the pandemic was the unplanned and involuntary transition of Nevada’s public colleges and universities to remote learning, and it has been demonstrated that as a State, we are fully capable of delivering a college education, in its entirety, online.
 
The current university system in Nevada only affords you the opportunity to earn a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degree if you are capable of attending in-class sessions, which disproportionately affects low income families. Most Nevada families do not have the financial capability, to choose to have an able-bodied adult, graduating from high school, to not work, and go from high school to college, let alone, be able to afford an ever-increasing cost of education. This lack of option requires young graduating adults, who could be tomorrow’s Physicists, Mathematicians, Chemists, and Engineers, to throw away their dreams, and go straight into the workforce as today’s retail sales clerks, food service workers, and custodians, which are always the first to be laid off during cyclical economic downturns. We are currently making a willful decision to force future generations to repeat the same mistakes of today, but we have the potential to cultivate a strong STEM focused, educational shift in our state which could set the precedent for other state run, publicly funded schools in the country.
 
It was quickly demonstrated during the Spring semester of the pandemic that even courses such as Calculus, Physics, and Chemistry, which have “labs”, were able to be completed successfully in an online format. These are also courses whose labs, prior to the pandemic, were never readily offered at night or with many options for attending on the weekend, which further drives a wedge between Nevada’s low income youth and STEM degrees.
 
We want the Nevada State Legislature to mandate that immediately, all Nevada public, post-secondary institutions be required to make available, all courses and programs that do not require a residency, in an online format. We are already there and doing it now because of the pandemic, but we can’t allow ourselves to regress back to the old, archaic way of earning an education.