2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 392: Supporting Low-Income Engineering Transfer Students’ Transition from Community College to a 4-Year University through a Comprehensive Scholarship Program

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Supporting Low-Income Engineering Transfer Students’ Transition from Community College to a 4-Year University through a Comprehensive Scholarship Program

There is a lack of low-income community college students who successfully transfer to four-year-institutions, graduate with an engineering baccalaureate degree and enter the STEM workforce/graduate school. To remedy this situation, the current project, funded through an NSF S-STEM grant, developed a scholarship program to help low-income students from diverse backgrounds to successfully transfer to and persist in the engineering program of a four-year university. The designed program targets the population of students who have the ambition to pursue engineering degrees, but often lack the resources or exposure to engineering opportunities. The aim of the project is to increase the number of community college students who successfully transfer to an engineering major at a 4-year institution and to improve the transfer student experience in engineering by providing co-curriculum cohort activities to prepare for STEM careers or graduate studies. Co-curricular activities included summer bridge programs, advising, mentoring, tutoring, academic and career workshops, and industry and research internships.

To assess the success of the program, one of the outcomes of interest is students’ academic performance. In order to assess whether the transfer students receiving support through the scholarship program show improved academic performance, participating transfer students were matched with transfer students with similar socioeconomic background that are not participating in the scholarship program. Propensity-score matching was used to find a control group of Engineering transfer students to compare to the S-STEM scholars. The matched pairs were then compared with regards to their term and end-of-year GPA. While the program is still ongoing, preliminary analyses indicate that the transfer students enrolled in the scholarship program outperform their matched counterparts in terms of GPA. This provides a first indication that the scholarship program was successful in enriching transfer students’ experiences and securing their retention in the engineering major.

Authors

Dr. Anna-Lena Dicke http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8816-455X University of California, Irvine [biography]

Dr. Dicke is an Associate Project Scientist within the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. In her research, she aims to understand how students’ motivation and interest in the STEM fields can be fostered to secure their educational persistence and long-term career success. Trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice, she is currently involved in an NSF-funded project aimed at fostering the persistence and retention of low-income engineering transfer students.
Kameryn Denaro http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9175-1640
Analia E. Rao University of California, Irvine
Dr. David A. Copp http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5206-5223 University of California, Irvine [biography]

David A. Copp received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Prior to joining UCI, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. His broad research interests include engineering education, as well as control and optimization of nonlinear and hybrid systems with applications to power and energy systems, multi-agent systems, robotics, and biomedicine. He is the recipient of several awards for his innovative teaching and excellence in research mentorship.
Dr. Hye Rin Lee University of Delaware [biography]

Hye Rin Lee is a NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine with a concentration in Human Development in Context. Her research interests include motivation, psychological interventions, role models, academic engagement, and higher education.
Dr. Gregory Diggs-Yang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0835-5255 University of California, Irvine [biography]

Greg is the Assistant Director of the Office of Access and Inclusion. He networks with students, faculty, and industry to form meaningful connections for students to utilize. Greg has his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Multicultural Education. His research interests include race, ethnicity, identity development, and support in educational spaces.
Prof. Lorenzo Valdevit

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