2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

C3STEM: Community Colleges Collaborating in STEM is an S-STEM Track 2 National Science Foundation grant, started in fall of 2020, that has established pre- and post-transfer support, co-curricular, and career development activities for supporting recruitment, retention, and student success in STEM. Specifically, C3STEM uses institutional partnerships between community colleges and small private universities to promote transfer capital and student engagement in STEM transfer students. There are four objectives of the project. The first objective is to increase the number of academically talented and low-income students that transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. The second objective is to improve the retention and graduation rates of CC transfer students in STEM fields by providing them with evidence-based curricular activities, co-curricular activities, and support services. The third objective is to increase the number of students placed into STEM graduate programs or professional positions by providing intensive faculty mentoring and research opportunities. The final objective is to generate new knowledge about how partnerships between CCs and small private universities can promote broader participation of academically talented, low-income CC transfer students in STEM. While the grant is ongoing, this poster will provide preliminary quantitative survey results of community college students about transfer capital, qualitative results from interviews of community college partners, and quantitative and qualitative survey results of curricular and co-curricular support services of scholars enrolled in the program. Preliminary results indicate that the primary obstacles to students transferring to small private universities are financial and logistical with community colleges and large state schools offering support services and pathways for students that small, private colleges either do not offer or do not advertise sufficiently. These support services can include food banks, childcare, low-cost housing, part-time degree paths, and evening and online classes.