Strengthening Degree Attainment Pathways for Pre-engineering and Mechanical Engineering Majors in Rural Southwestern United States

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this project aims to increase post-secondary education access, affordability, and degree attainment in the field of Mechanical Engineering for students from groups historically underserved in STEM who live in the Southwestern US borderlands—Yuma (AZ) and Imperial (CA) counties. Students living in these counties lack the opportunity to complete an engineering bachelor’s degree while living at home, a critically important feature for the targeted student population due to strong family connections and deep traditions.

To address this challenge, the project will deploy a holistic approach that integrates curricular, extracurricular, and programmatic activities in a newly established transfer and articulation agreement between Arizona Western College (AWC) and Northern Arizona University (NAU)-Yuma and will establish a similar articulation agreement with the Imperial Valley College (IVC), to provide students with a pathway to an engineering bachelor’s degree close to home. In addition, this project also intends to increase awareness among middle and high school students from the surrounding communities about engineering, aiming to help increase the number of Mechanical Engineering graduates with strong ties to the region.

This project will establish a framework for implementing similar articulation pathways in other regions with large populations of students from groups historically underserved in STEM where there are limited opportunities to pursue Bachelor of Science degrees in STEM fields. The community outreach aspects of the project also aspire to create awareness about the degree programs within the targeted communities and to increase community support to grow and train an engineering workforce for regional needs.

This project involves the following three complementary pathways grounded in a strong theory of change - Curricular Pathways, Recruitment, Retention, and Degree Completion Pathways, and Extra-curricular Pathways. Applied together these approaches will strengthen timely degree attainment for pre-engineering and mechanical engineering majors in rural Southwestern US that reflect the full spectrum of diverse student talent.

The planned research will contribute important findings to the body of knowledge in STEM higher education regarding the relationship between academic success outcomes and coordinated support programs and services. The approach will benefit society by increasing retention and graduation rates for students from groups historically underserved in STEM, leading to increased employment diversity in a high demand engineering field in a geographical area that could strongly benefit from an engineering workforce with deep roots in the region.

The outcomes of this project will be disseminated through journal publications and conference presentations, as well as through communications posted on social media and HSI Hub outlets. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs.

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.