FICO targets Drake State, other HBCUs for Analytics Challenge

Drake State Community and Technical College is off to a fast start in 2025, claiming two firsts in its field during the month of January.

Drake State received over $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Labor as part of its latest round of Strengthening Community Colleges Training Grants, becoming the first institution in the state to receive the award.

On the heels of that announcement, Drake State revealed it had been added to Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO)’s Analytics Challenge Program, becoming the first community college to participate. Drake State joins three other Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), bringing the total number of participating schools in the 2024-2025 initiative to seven. This program is designed to educate aspiring data scientists.

The other newcomers recently named to the challenge are North Carolina Central University, Fayetteville State University, and Alabama A&M University. However, Alabama A&M is returning for its second consecutive school year.

The FICO program is targeting HBCUs to curtail bias in the data science and AI fields.

“We have 16 students that are participating in the FICO data analytics challenge where they are building a model that will detect fraud in credit card transactions,’’ Lydia Owens, Drake State’s Division Chair for Computer Information Systems (CIS), Business, and Accounting said during a media conference at the school.

Dr. Scott Zoldi, FICO’s Chief Analytics Officer, represented the company.

“He’s here to give a little more context about (the challenge) to the students, meet with the students, have them talk about, or he’s gonna talk about, the positions, jobs, and salaries that are available in data analytics and AI,” said Owens.

“We’re excited. Drake State is the first community college to be in the challenge,” said Zoldi. “Most of the other colleges are four-year institutions. So we’re excited because we’re the first among community colleges to join the challenge.’’

Zoldi, based in San Diego, and his team of world-class data scientists will provide weekly lectures and mentor students. Zoldi will also give in-person lectures at the schools to further support the program.

“This is a challenge that we’re doing with HBCUs, which focuses on empowering students from these universities and colleges to have real life experience working on AI and data science problems that we solve within industry,’’ Zoldi said. 

Zoldi said the program focused on HBCUs because, “there is the fact that African American and Black percentages in data science as a representation is probably three times lower than it needs to be. So our first focus is on increasing diversity. Why that’s important to us is that these AI models can have a huge amount of bias in them in terms of how they’re constructed, with the data you use to construct these models.”

“We need as many voices and many perspectives in the development of these AI solutions,” he continued. “That’s one of the reasons why I want to make sure that we can kind of improve those statistics around representation from African, African American, Black data sciences within the industry.’’

Currently in its second year, the semester-long FICO program is designed to give students real world problems to solve using data and AI, and to inspire the next generation of data scientists. 

“We saw that many of the HBCUs are still developing data science programs,’’ Zoldi said. “They tend to be underfunded compared to (other) universities. And so we felt that this was an opportunity to provide a helping hand in terms of having an ability to partner with them to ensure that those students at these universities that want to aspire to be in data science or work in AI and are interested in these areas have that opportunity.’’

Zoldi added that the program could also benefit FICO.

“We want them to be part of our team eventually so as we invest in them, right, and we introduce them to what those jobs look like,’’ he said. “If they continue to be interested in that, they can join our team or other teams.’’

FICO, short for the Fair Isaac Corporation, was founded in 1956. The company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 U.S.and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries.

“We’ll still maintain our core programming languages, theory classes, but we do need to delve as the Alabama Community College system starts to delve into AI,’’ said Owens, who is also a CIS instructor. “We’ll start to delve into it as well. We now just incorporate it into a couple of our classes so that the students can get a taste of it.’’

For more information, visit https://www.fico.com/en.