2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

STEM fields play an important role in providing job opportunities and improving economic growth. The United States suffers from a shortage of and lack of diversity in STEM workers, particularly in engineering. One way to alleviate these challenges is to encourage students to choose engineering disciplines and support them as they progress through their engineering programs so that they develop a strong identity and sense of belonging in their chosen discipline. The University of X (UofX) has been collaborating with the University of Colorado Denver and Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis in the Urban STEM Collaboratory project since 2018. This NSF-funded project supports academically talented students with demonstrated financial need from the colleges/schools of engineering at the three institutions. The main goals of this project are increasing the recruitment, retention, success, and graduation rates of students and implementing strategies contributing to student academic success, development of STEM identity, and workforce readiness.

In this project, the UofX has supported more than 50 engineering and mathematics students since the academic year 2019-2020. This paper presents participation data, outcomes, and impacts of this five-year experience for UofX scholars. For both scholars and other eligible students, demographic data including gender, race and ethnicity, and first-generation status and academic performance data including overall GPA, GPA in math courses, GPA in major courses, credits received, retention rates, and graduation status are presented. Also, academic performance of scholars and non-scholars (S-STEM eligible students) are compared. The data is also analyzed to report gender and underrepresented/represented demographics.

The UofX scholars showed better academic performance across all measured categories and higher retention rates than S-STEM eligible students. To gain better insight into the impacts of the Urban STEM project on personal and academic life of the scholars, focus groups and interviews were used to allow scholars who have participated in the project to share more detail regarding their experiences, the benefits they gained, and the obstacles they faced. These findings and insights can support implementation or improvement of similar engineering student success initiatives at other institutions.