Students on 12 American Indian pueblos in New Mexico soon will be able to earn a degree from New Mexico State University without ever leaving home, and tribal leaders are hopeful that this will mean a workforce better equipped to manage burgeoning tribal businesses.

NMSU's "Digital Pathways" program, a $2 million expansion of the university's distance-education offerings, is a collaboration between NMSU, the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) and the New Mexico Tribal Higher Education Commission.

For most of the pueblos, it will be the first time college courses have been offered online to their residents. Distance education centers will begin opening this fall on the Cochiti, Acoma, Laguna and Santa Domingo pueblos as well as the cluster known as the Eight Northern Pueblos, which includes Tesque, San Ildefonso, Pojoaque, Santa Clara, Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh (formerly known as San Juan), Picuris and Taos.

Digital Pathways is part of NMSU's efforts to reach American Indian students, a demographic with low levels of college completion in New Mexico. At NMSU in 1998, only 18.6 percent of Native students who entered college graduated within six years, compared to 48 percent of white students.

On the pueblos and reservations, this results in a shortage of educated Native workers, meaning that while many of the tribes have created business operations such as casinos, hotels and golf courses that make millions of dollars every year, they are often not managed by Native people.

That's why NMSU, in addition to bringing to the pueblos the 28 degrees it usually offers to distance education students, will create four new emphasis programs especially designed to address tribal workforce issues. The four programs will be tribal management, criminal justice with an emphasis on tribal law, tribal health care and hotel, restaurant and tourism management.

Carmen Gonzales, vice provost for distance education and the dean of the NMSU College of Extended Learning, says the degrees for which NMSU will develop a tribal emphasis option were chosen by tribal leaders who identified critical shortages of business management professionals and health care workers.

NMSU has secured $500,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, but the university will supply another $1.5 million to cover the cost of the first three years of the statewide program. After that, the university expects that the program will be somewhat self-supporting through tuition and possibly more grants. SIPI, the state's largest tribal college, with 800 students, will be part of the process, and SIPI instructors will teach some of the courses offered through the NMSU program.

NMSU's distance education programs had an enrollment of 2,190 in 2005. The goal for the first stage of the Digital Pathways program is to enroll 80 students from the pueblos.