logo
Franklin Tech and PSU launch tuition-free pathway for vo-tech students

Franklin Tech and PSU launch tuition-free pathway for vo-tech students

Yahoo10-04-2025

JOPLIN, Mo. — A new partnership is stretching from Kansas to Missouri, giving the chance for a free education for vo-tech students.
It's a free education for students who want to help build the future.
'Just a tremendous opportunity for some young people that maybe college and a technology degree would have never been possible,' said David Weaver, Joplin Schools School Board member.
Franklin Tech and PSU launch tuition-free pathway for vo-tech students
Controversial council member's transgender comments spark recall effort
Joplin woman charged with child sex crime after minor found in car
Locals say age no excuse to not protest
How does your state spend its lottery earnings?
Leaders of Franklin Technology Center and Pittsburg State University signed an agreement to help students at FTC go to PSU tuition-free.
Up to 10 students a year will qualify for the new 'Crossland College of Technology Enterprise Program.' That will cover the cost of tuition and fees for up to four years.
PSU VP Dr. Karl Stumo is excited about the partnership that crosses state lines.
'We know of the excellence here at Franklin Tech, and we wanted to be a partner with one of the best providers of technical education in the area. So their students are so special, we wanted to develop an equal special relationship here as well,' said Dr. Karl Stumo, PSU VP Student Affairs.
He hopes to see more of those students graduating and staying.
'I think this is a strategy to keep our graduates in the technology and that economic sector in the Four-State region,' said Stumo.
'Hopefully this will help us to grow the enrollment at Franklin Tech and provide more opportunities, and then maybe these partnerships that make us eligible for grants so we're just excited about the possibilities. But it's kind of opening doors. In the past that wouldn't have been possible for our students and that's a win for everyone,' said Weaver.
Students enrolled at FTC next fall will be the first to qualify for the scholarships, which include those pursuing everything from automated manufacturing and auto tech to engineering and HVAC.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Big Tech's bet on Trump hasn't yielded special favors
Big Tech's bet on Trump hasn't yielded special favors

New York Post

time3 days ago

  • New York Post

Big Tech's bet on Trump hasn't yielded special favors

On Inauguration Day 2025, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai secured front-row seats, their $1 million donations and Mar-a-Lago visits seemingly successful in endearing themselves to the President they had for years tried to censor. Yet, months into his second term, the millions they spent on Trump — along with billions pledged by OpenAI, Apple, and Meta for US investment (Zuckerberg even bought a house in D.C. ) — hasn't won them any favors. Big Tech now faces relentless antitrust scrutiny, with a spate of recent reports suggesting their efforts to win over Trump have produced no real benefits. Meta is facing a suit from the FTC over allegations the company's acquisitions have given it monopolistic power. Apple is contending with a suit from the DOJ over concerns it has created a monopoly in the smartphone market. Google is dealing with suits from the DOJ over concerns about monopolies in its ad tech and search businesses. Advertisement 4 Tech billionaires were given prime real estate at the Inauguration — but that hasn't translated to special treatment. Getty Images 'Zuckerberg pumped millions of dollars… and all he got was going to court,' one source with knowledge of Trump's thinking on tech said. 'They got nothing other than Inauguration seats,' the source added, noting that tech leaders opposed Trump's preferred antitrust nominees to FTC and DOJ Antitrust — Andrew Ferguson, Gail Slater, and Mark Meador — yet lost those battles. 'The Facebook lawsuit is still going forward and now there are rumors swirling of a potential lawsuit against Apple.' Advertisement Steve Bannon, who I interviewed earlier this week, told me those coveted inauguration seats were about Trump flexing — not about owing Silicon Valley any favors. 'They were all sitting there thinking they own President Trump … it turned out President Trump started crushing them, whether in federal court or with other anti-trust, anti-trust efforts,' Bannon said. While tech leaders have ramped up their visits to the White House in recent months, the aides who Trump works with day-in and day-out are nudging him to take on Big Tech after what they feel was years of mistreatment. 'He was ready to make peace until we reminded him of the hundreds of millions they spent trying to silence him and run him out of office,' one of Trump's tech advisors told me. Advertisement 4 Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to buy a house in Washington, D.C., to be close to the political action. REUTERS Trump's team, sources told me, are now pushing for aggressive measures, including a potential consent decree as part of an FTC deal that could force Meta to pay restitution to conservative users and businesses harmed by content moderation that was ratcheted up dramatically during covid. While Meta has made recent efforts to hire more right-leaning employees and conservative Joel Kaplan recently got a promotion to head of public policy, it's not enough, some say. 'You're not going to fix this with Bush Republicans,' the MAGA advisor said sharply. Advertisement 4 Tim Cook's efforts to win over Trump haven't won him any favors. Getty Images Mike Davis, a conservative legal strategist, echoed this sentiment, telling me 'Meta spent $400 million chasing Trump out of office and subjected him to four years of unrelenting lawfare. If they want to regain trust, they need permanent solutions—restitution for censorship victims and mass hiring of Trump-aligned officials. It'll take years and concrete steps, not empty promises.' Conservatives aren't just focused on past grievances; they're wary of future threats. 'Meta censored doctors and scientists during COVID, potentially costing lives,' another source told me. 'Now they're trying to steal every copyright for their AI while pretending to make amends … they think they can steal data just like China because they say they want to compete with China.' And in the back of many conservative's minds is the recognition there may be just a small window to make the necessary changes. This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC's power players (and those who aspire to be). Bannon, whose 'War Room' program shapes the MAGA agenda, remains adamant: 'Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google—they all need to be broken up. Big Tech is the most dangerous force in the country… we have to go after them,' he said in our interview. 4 Sources said Big Tech's recent efforts to make up with the president don't erase their long history of going after Trump. Getty Images Advertisement 'All the oligarchs are progressive Democrats … they became MAGA at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the 5th of November when President Trump was declared the winner. That's when they all had this Damascene moment,' he added. And Bannon believes the moment the political winds change, they'll go back to the left. And it's not just Trump they have to worry about. Even Trump's likely successor, J.D. Vance, is reportedly more hawkish on antitrust issues. Advertisement Vance has even praised Biden's aggressive FTC Chair Lina Khan who made it her mission to break up big tech. For now, the tech titans' investments and gestures have bought them little more than a front-row view of their own reckoning. Send NYNext a tip: nynextlydia@

The diabolically clever scam that keeps duping desperate Gen Zers
The diabolically clever scam that keeps duping desperate Gen Zers

Yahoo

time4 days ago

  • Yahoo

The diabolically clever scam that keeps duping desperate Gen Zers

It's easy to read a text offering what is clearly a fake job and think, "Who in the world would fall for this?" Of course, Temu or Target isn't going to send me an unsolicited message with a too-good-to-be-true employment offer out of the blue. Except scammers don't do things that don't work — so while it may seem obvious to you, there are people who absolutely fall for these tricks, and no one is immune. Scam texts have exploded in recent years (which I probably don't have to tell you — if you have a cellphone, you're most likely well aware). Consumers reported losing $470 million to text message scams in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission, five times the amount reported in 2020. The actual amount of money lost could be much higher, given that many people don't alert the FTC when scammed. Fake package delivery was the most common scam, but the No. 2 was job offers — texts from purported recruiters either offering positions at well-known companies or promising big bucks in exchange for doing online tasks that seem relatively mundane. "We are definitely seeing both a growth in reported losses to text scams and also a growth in reported losses to job scams," says Kati Daffan, an attorney for the FTC in its Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Reported losses to job scams increased more than three times between 2020 and 2023." Now, the flood of job scams could get even worse. There is increased opportunity for dupers: The labor market is getting rockier, Americans are increasingly on edge about their finances, and many people really want to work remotely. At the same time, the means of cranking out these texts is getting more sophisticated: AI makes scam texts easier to craft in ways that seem plausible and realistic. The overall result is that unsuspecting job seekers may become even more susceptible to hoaxes. "It's likely that as unemployment increases and more people are worried about the economic uncertainty, if the scams aren't necessarily increasing, the likelihood that people might fall for them will be," says Selena Larson, a staff threat researcher at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company. The way scam texts work is pretty straightforward: You get a message out of nowhere about a supposed thrilling work opportunity. It may come from a phone number, or it's from an official-looking email address. The offer seems enticing, albeit somewhat unrealistic given how jobs and money usually go — it may promise a super-high salary for just a couple of hours a day of menial online work. It can also come with some weird facets, such as conducting interviews entirely via text, promising to pay in crypto, or asking you to pay them before they pay you. Eva Velasquez, the CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit, says her organization saw a big bump in job scam reports in 2023 that took them by surprise. Since then, the number has ebbed and flowed, but the scams are here to stay. "They are very lucrative. They can capture not only your data but often your money," she says. Scammers get people to hand over personal information that would be par for the course for a legit hiring process — Social Security numbers, pictures of their driver's licenses and passports, bank account numbers. That information can be used to try to steal people's identities and for other nefarious ends. And for someone who really wants a new job, the mundanity of the requests can be deceiving. "That I think is why it's confusing to people is when you have a legitimate offer and you do start with an employer, they do need that information," Velasquez says. As much as many people like to feel that they'd never fall for a scam, we're all susceptible to them, to some extent. What's not so normal is job scammers asking victims to kick in their own money. The trick goes like this: After supposedly hiring someone or getting far enough in the process, the scammer will send someone a check and ask them to buy work-related equipment with it, such as a printer or office supplies. But the check will be for more money than the stuff costs, so they'll ask the person to send the difference back. Later, the check bounces, and the person is out of the money they spent on the equipment and sent to the scammer — and, potentially, in hot water for depositing a fake check. They may also ask people to buy gift cards or make payments to fake vendors who are in on the scam. Daffan, from the FTC, says it has specifically seen a spike in task scams, in which consumers are asked to complete little activities online, such as liking videos or rating products on an app or platform, to earn commission. The texts say the activity is for "product boosting" or "app optimization," which can sound realistic. "But then once people start doing this work, there's a whole system designed to trick them to actually pay money into the app, and eventually, they'll end up losing money and never being given any of the money that they were promised," Daffan says. And as much as many people like to feel that they'd never fall for a scam, we're all susceptible to them, to some extent. "It relies on this concept of social engineering and the hackers being very compelling. They make you feel something, they make you feel excited," Larson says. "They make you feel like you want to be a part of this ecosystem, that this job is a great opportunity that you don't want to lose." The stereotypical victim of a fraudster is an older person — your grandmother on the phone with someone who claims to be from Publishers Clearing House, telling her she's won a million dollars but has to kick in some of her own cash first. But in the modern world, that stereotype is out of date, including when it comes to job text scams: A lot of young people take the bait. Gen Zers and millennials are used to doing everything online, even making major life decisions. Nothing, whether it's booking a vacation, renting an apartment, or paying a friend back, feels like a "big screen" task anymore, let alone a do-this-in-person one. It's all on the small screen. "I'm a Gen Xer. For me, someone conducting very serious business over text just doesn't resonate with me," Velasquez says. "For young people, they're like, we do everything over text. It doesn't raise alarm bells." You look at the Gen Zs and the younger millennials and they just click, click, click, click, click, click. Younger people are more accustomed to the idea of side hustles. They're in the hunt for extra cash, especially if they can earn it with little effort online, and "like these videos for money" may not seem that abnormal to them in a world where "post videos on TikTok for money" is an aspired-to reality. Gen Z also faces an especially tough job market. Between tech layoffs and federal government job cuts, many avenues they may have pursued have dried up. Companies aren't hiring the way they were a few years ago, and people with jobs aren't quitting. That can specifically affect younger people looking to get a foot in the door — if nobody's going out, they can't get in. The result: a generation that's extra prone to falling into scams offering jobs and side-hustle cash. "You look at the Gen Zs and the younger millennials and they just click, click, click, click, click, click," says Alex Quilici, the CEO of YouMail, a service that helps block scam texts and calls. As I reported this story, I became increasingly alarmed about job scam texts. If the labor market is worsening, meaning more people are going to fall for this stuff, shouldn't we be doing more to stop it? On the list of a million worries, I'd really rather not add "my niece got bamboozled out of $1,000 because of some click farm scam" to the list. It turns out that doing something about this is hard. When I ask Kate Griffin, with the Aspen Institute's Financial Security Program, who's responsible for clamping down on scam texts, she tells me, "That's the problem." It's sort of everyone's job, which also means it's sort of no one's job. "A lot of people have a component part of it," she says. "There's a part of the FBI that goes after this. There's a part of the Treasury Department that is focused on the anti-money-laundering part of it. The FTC, of course, holds their component of it, but there's not a single coordinating entity to say, 'What is our national approach to fighting this?'" As far as how the private sector can combat this, it's complicated, too. Griffin explains that while telecommunications companies are the infrastructure layer, they don't necessarily have the ability to know what's inside messages. She notes that CTIA, a trade association that represents the wireless industry, has a "secure messaging initiative" whose goal is to put a stop to unwanted or illegal text messages. Besides its app that lets consumers block unwanted communications from spammers and scammers, Quilici's YouMail also collects data to alert phone carriers of scams and bad actors. Still, it's hard for companies to get their arms around the problem — scammers are savvy, and the business incentives to crack down on them aren't particularly compelling. "If you wanted to try to stop it, you'd have to make it really, really difficult for anybody to get a phone number," Quilici says. Texting and calling cost next to nothing. Making communications more expensive would make scamming less lucrative, but it would also make basic functions pricier for everyone else. Companies (or the government) could implement know-your-customer laws, as banks have, so carriers have to know whom they're giving a number to, but that would be onerous, too. "There's a big tension between their desire to sell services and quickly and stopping fraud," Quilici says. "I don't view the carriers as bad guys. I view them as having a business problem." The unwillingness of the government and phone carriers to make a concerted effort against scam texts puts a lot of onus on individual consumers to try to protect themselves, which is not an easy task. A lot of these scams look realistic — ChatGPT makes it easier to write a scam, meaning the grammar mistakes that might have set off some spidey senses are less likely to appear. These scams don't just take place via text; they can also come in emails or even in social media messages on platforms such as LinkedIn, where contact from a recruiter would seem quite normal. And they often invoke big-name companies that people would like to work for, which may increase the likelihood that someone falls for a trick. What's one to do in this scenario? First, scrutinize where the text came from. (Is it a weird email address or a foreign phone number? Though scammers can make those look plausible, too.) Next, do a deep reading of the message itself, checking whether the grammar is right and whether the offer seems too good to be true. A six-figure job for clicking boxes on an app sounds lovely, but it's also not a thing that exists. Mention of pay in crypto is a red flag, as are interviews via text. If the alleged employer asks you for money, that's a no-no. As a general rule, you shouldn't have to pay money to make money. "Our advice is never click on links or respond to unexpected texts or WhatsApp messages or other messages about jobs. Real employers will never contact you that way," Daffan says. She asks people to report fraud to the FTC. One of the reasons that job scams are flourishing is that many people do want to work extra and make extra income. If you do think a job offer could be legitimate, see whether you can find the listing online — and make sure it's real and matches on details such as salary and location. People can also just contact the prospective employer directly to find out if it is a fake. And if you do get scammed out of money, contact your bank immediately and try to get the money back. Ultimately, Quilici says, the best advice is to slow down. There's no need to respond to that job offer text right away. Larson echoes the point. "If they're trying to rush you, they're trying to hire you, and they ask to be paid for something, that's all red flags," she says. Anyone who's interviewed for a job lately knows that the process can drag on for a wildly long time. Overall, the good news is that as time goes on and more people learn about scams, the more we collectively become inoculated to different tactics and hoaxes. People were highly susceptible to email scams when they first got email addresses. Now, you still hear about them, but they're a lot less common, and most people have an easier time spotting them. In the meantime, the bad news is that a tougher labor market means we may not have time for this natural collective education to happen. When people are anxious about money and work, they're likelier to have blind spots that scammers know how to exploit. If you're on month five of the job search and worried about how you're going to pay rent, you'll probably reply to that text faster than you would under normal circumstances. "One of the reasons that job scams are flourishing is that many people do want to work extra and make extra income, and they're looking for an opportunity to do that," Daffan says. "And scammers know that, and so they know there's a big market out there if they can have a convincing job scam. And, unfortunately, that is the case." Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy. Read the original article on Business Insider

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store