Fostering Equity, Support and Community for Low-Income Undergraduates with Academic Potential in STEM

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 Willamette University, a private liberal arts university in Oregon. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 72 unique full-time students (three cohorts of 24 students) who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry, computer science, data science, environmental science, exercise/health science, mathematics, or physics.

First-year students will receive a 4-year scholarship. Scholarship recipients will share significant academic and co-curricular support activities, including residential and social cohort structures, near-peer mentorship, campus leadership positions, on- and off-campus research experiences, as well as targeted exposure to STEM post-graduate opportunities and preparation for navigating the job market provided in collaboration with Willamette's Office of Career Development.

This project will gather data to inform the development of support systems and advance understanding of best practices to better serve an increasingly diverse population of STEM students. Institutionalization of these practices will be emphasized to ensure that benefits of the project persist in the long term. More broadly and importantly, its findings will enable other institutions to develop and successfully implement support structures for low-income students in STEM.

This project will continue the work of Willamette University's earlier Track 1 S-STEM project (NSF award # DUE-1742159) and will focus on four key objectives. First is continuing to increase recruitment of STEM students with high financial need and reducing the financial burden of achieving a degree. Second is continuing to maintain or increase retention and graduation rates for low-income STEM students above Willamette's current S-STEM Scholars & Fellows 90% retention rate, and helping to improve Willamette’s four-, five-, and six-year overall graduation rates.

Third is strengthening mentoring in STEM departments and with campus partners such as Willamette's Office of Career Development to ensure participants graduate with a personalized plan to guide their post-baccalaureate pursuits, and encouraging development of leadership skills through participation in campus activities. Fourth, and finally, is to continue improving Willamette’s institutional understanding of low-income STEM students’ strengths and needs, and establishing which evidence-based practices and strategies best support these, so that they can become institutionalized and ensure the long term impact of the project.

The project will gather qualitative attitudinal data through focus groups and one-on-one interviews, as well as quantitative data through regular surveys typically once every semester). Outcomes of S-STEM scholarship recipients will be compared to their non-S-STEM peers, and results will be disseminated in peer reviewed journals and at relevant disciplinary conferences.

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.