2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Keywords: Pre-college, Undergraduate, Engineering.
Abstract
In the United States, increasing enrollment and retention in engineering degrees remains an ongoing challenge in higher education. Moreover, current university educational efforts aim to increase the immediate enrollment of diverse students right after high school completion. To ensure academic success and persistence in engineering in the early stages of college life, early educational programs such as Summer Bridge are developed to increase academic preparation, goal achievement, and persistence in students prior to their first academic semester. Even though Summer Bridge Programs (SBP) are well known across higher institutions, little research has been conducted about the impact of the program on student success, especially for underrepresented minority students (URM). At Mississippi State University, the Summer Bridge program has been implemented for more than 25 years. However, a strategic partnership has recently been implemented that provides cooperation between the university and industry sponsors. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the new SBP structure at MSU in enhancing college success for incoming engineering students. The paper provides an overview of the five pillars of the program (academics, bonding, engineering at MSU, engineering projects, and industry), their goals, expected outcomes, and ways to assess their contribution to the retention of URM students. By conducting pre- and post-student surveys with the 36 participants in the 2024 cohort, we investigated how participation in the summer bridge program affects academic readiness, self-efficacy levels, goal orientation, expectations, and sense of belonging among participants and ultimately their intentions to pursue or not pursue an engineering major. The paper presents the results using scale instruments and an evaluation of the degree to which the goals and objectives of the current program structure were met. We also use the survey results to identify important summer bridge activities that improve academic readiness and success for incoming engineering students, with a special focus on Black engineering students as they represent the majority of participation in our program. Finally, results from the data collection are used to identify areas of improvement for future cohorts in an attempt to understand the driving factors that influence persistence in engineering degrees at the Bagley College of Engineering.