Financial and Programmatic Supports to Prepare Undergraduates for Work in Technology Fields

This project will help meet the national need for skilled scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians. It will do so by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with verified financial need at Pittsburgh Technical College. This College is a non-profit, private institution that offers Associate of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees in more than thirty fields.

Over five years, the project will provide two-year scholarships to 25 full-time students who are pursuing Associate Degrees in Information Technology, Network Administration, Information Technology, Security and Forensics, Computer Programming, or Electronics Engineering Technology. These Scholars will also benefit from faculty mentoring, as well as participation in coordinated classes and service-learning projects, such as teaching STEM concepts to public school students.

Insights gained from this project will help Pittsburgh Technical College better understand the financial and academic supports that best support their students to complete their classes and degrees, ready to enter the STEM workforce. In addition, project activities and outcomes will be shared with other two-year colleges, thus informing the efforts of other institutions to recruit, retain, and graduate students in associate STEM degree programs.

The goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project has three objectives: (i) ensure that 85% of the Scholars are retained from semester to semester; (ii) ensure that 75% of the Scholars graduate on time; and (iii) ensure that 90% of all retained Scholars are employed in a STEM-related job or transfer to a four-year institution within six months of graduation.

The project team hypothesizes that financial aid and specific programmatic supports will differentially affect groups of students. To test this hypothesis, the project team will conduct research to identify effective ways to increase student retention rates and to distinguish which supports are most effective for different student groups. The project will address two research questions: (i) Are financial or programmatic supports more effective in retaining academically talented students with high financial need in two-year, associate degree STEM degree programs? and (ii) Does the effectiveness of specific supports differ according to students’ gender, race, and residency on versus off campus?

Project results will be shared across the College and with the broader community of STEM education researchers through conference presentations and journal articles. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields.

It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.