Chicago's Community Colleges Become the Midwest's Free On-Ramp to AI Skills

For generations, Chicago’s community colleges have done one quiet, essential job: opening a door for people the economy keeps overlooking. Now that door opens onto machine learning.

On March 12, 2026, City Colleges of Chicago announced it had been selected as a regional lead institution for the AWS Machine Learning University (AWS-MLU) program — and with that designation, it established the Midwest AI/Machine Learning Initiative Powered by AWS. The detail that matters most sits in the fine print: the initiative brings the AWS cloud learning environment to faculty and their classrooms at no cost to participants.

Free matters here because of who walks through those doors. City Colleges operates seven colleges across the city, serving more than 70,000 students — more than three-quarters of whom are Black or Latino. These are the working-class Chicagoans most often left out of the AI economy. Now their neighborhood college is the Midwest’s hub for getting in.

Teach the teachers first

The design is deliberately practical. Rather than dropping students into a corporate training portal, the initiative invests in the people who already know how to reach them: their professors. Faculty from City Colleges’ STEM sectors receive training, curated curriculum resources, and ongoing support, so what they learn about AI and machine learning flows directly into their own classrooms.

Students feel it from there. The initiative includes high-visibility faculty bootcamps and student business case competitions that connect classroom AI learning to real-world scenarios — the kind of hands-on, applied work community colleges have always done best.

“Being named the Midwest AI/Machine Learning Initiative Powered by AWS is a milestone that solidifies City Colleges of Chicago’s role as a premier convener of AI and advanced technology education,” Chancellor Juan Salgado said in the announcement. Salgado has led the system since 2017, after a career spent improving education and economic opportunity for residents of low-income communities.

The reach is bigger than Chicago. “This partnership reflects City Colleges’ commitment to staying at the forefront of innovation,” said Ayoka Noelle Samuels, Associate Vice Chancellor of the system’s Technology and Strategy Sector, in the release. “We’re excited to bring these tools to our faculty, and others around the Midwest.”

One of five — and built for the overlooked

City Colleges is one of five regional lead institutions named nationwide for the AWS-MLU program. Look at the company it keeps: the other four are Howard University, Delaware State University, Alabama A&M University, and Oklahoma City Community College — HBCUs and community colleges, not elite research universities. The program is aimed squarely at faculty and students at Midwest community colleges, HBCUs, and universities serving underrepresented STEM populations.

That focus is the point, says Dr. Margie Vela, Head of Strategic Initiatives for Machine Learning University at Amazon Web Services. “Establishing five regional lead institutions for the AWS-MLU Program marks a powerful step forward in scaling AI and machine learning education nationwide,” she said in the announcement. “I am especially enthusiastic about co-developing content with HBCUs and community colleges — uniting faculty expertise with industry insight to create learning experiences that are rigorous, relevant, and accessible.”

The designation didn’t appear out of nowhere; it grew out of a collaboration dating back to 2023.

Why a community college, and why now

City Colleges has been building toward this for a while. Separately, the system is a member of Complete College America’s AI Readiness Consortium, in which five inaugural institutions each design five new AI courses — 25 in total — that let students use AI tools on real-world employer projects.

Michael Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College, put the stakes for community-college learners plainly to Inside Higher Ed: “If the folks in our communities don’t get that information from us or through us, they’ll ultimately be on the back end of the labor advances.”

That’s the quiet urgency underneath the press release. AI skills are becoming a dividing line in the labor market, and the institutions best positioned to keep working people on the right side of it are the ones already embedded in their neighborhoods. In Chicago, that’s seven campuses, 70,000-plus students, and a faculty about to get very good at teaching machine learning — at no cost to the people learning it.

Based on reporting by City Colleges of Chicago, with additional details from Complete AI Training and Inside Higher Ed.

Stories like this one are why we exist: AI skills shouldn’t be gated by zip code or tuition. If you lead a mission-driven organization and want to bring practical AI capacity to your own team, start with our guide to AI for nonprofits — then join a workshop and learn it hands-on, the community-college way.