Empowering Low-Income Students through High Impact Practices to Achieve Academic and Professional Success in Engineering

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of California San Diego, Imperial Valley College, and Southwestern College. University of California San Diego is a public research university and an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).

Imperial Valley College and Southwestern College are 2-year community colleges and fully recognized HSIs. Over its 5-year duration, this project will fund 370 student-years of full-time scholarships to approximately 185 unique students who are pursuing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in engineering. Transfer-track students at their host institution will receive 2-year scholarships.

This project focuses evidence-based high-impact practices on the transition experience endured by transfer students before, during, and after their engagements with 2-year and 4-year institutions. The major significance of this work, beyond financially supporting these students in need, will be implementing, assessing, and ultimately sharing a model educational framework grounded in Schlossberg’s Transition Theory.

The transfer students, who undergo frequent and challenging transitions, will be supported with enrichment activities including mentorship, summer programming, research opportunities, and academic year technical and professional workshops.

The overall goal of this project is to increase Engineering degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The challenges faced by transfer students on their journey toward a STEM degree must be better understood. Each transitional step, in, through, and out of their respective institutions requires well-directed support and guidance.

This project aims to evaluate the diverse transitions experienced by transfer students and to intervene appropriately, using planned academic year and summer programming as vehicles to deliver the necessary support. Methodologies and results derived from this project will be shared through conference presentations and journal publications. 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.