Aspirar, An Integrated Program of Enhanced Advising and First-Year Experiences to Improve STEM Recruitment and Retention of Hispanic Students

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to enhance faculty advising and first-year student experiences, with an emphasis on attracting and retaining Hispanic students in the STEM Pathway programs. Yakima Valley College (YVC), a Hispanic-Serving Institution in Washington state, provides primarily 2-year degrees and certificates focused on workforce development and preparedness for four-year college programs.

Although 60% of YVC students identify as Hispanic, this proportion drops by half for students enrolled in STEM core courses. To address this under-representation this proposal will draw upon multiple student support strategies published in the literature. The evidence base for these strategies, predominantly produced by 4-year universities, is applied in novel ways to YVC a rural, 2-year, Hispanic-Serving Institution.

The Aspirar program will advance knowledge and understanding of the value of cohort-based training of faculty advisors, accelerating support services for new students, and increasing access to first-year experiences. Community colleges represent a key driver of future enrollment in universities and the Aspirar program is a strategic plan towards achieving a major societal goal of increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM.

To address this enormous disparity in student demographics in STEM courses versus non-STEM courses the Aspirar program will follow two guiding objectives: 1) Increase Hispanic, low-income, and overall Under-Represented Minority (URM) STEM recruitment and retention through expert advising and 2) Increase URM STEM recruitment and retention through first-year experiences for STEM Pathways students. These objectives will be achieved by combining high-impact activities of early interventions for new students, regular one-on-one advising, professional development in culturally responsive practices, and expanding student access to extracurricular experiences.

The effectiveness of the Aspirar program will be measured through a research-based design and will be compared with the traditional curriculum and will contribute to the knowledge of best practices in higher education, particularly for 2-year colleges. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs.

Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also draw from these approaches to generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

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.