2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is a lack of low-income community college students who successfully transfer to four-year-institutions, graduate with an engineering baccalaureate degree, attend graduate school, and enter the STEM workforce. To remedy this situation at one four-year institution, the current project developed a scholarship program to specifically help low-income students from diverse backgrounds to successfully transfer to and persist in the engineering program and graduate with an engineering baccalaureate degree. This program targets a population of often historically minoritized students who have the ambition to pursue engineering degrees, but often lack the resources or exposure to engineering opportunities. One of the aims of the program is to improve the retention of transfer students in engineering by providing co-curriculum cohort activities and ultimately promoting increased graduation rates. As part of the scholarship program, scholars experience a vast variety of co-curricular activities including summer bridge programs, advising, mentoring, tutoring, academic and career workshops, and industry and research internships. So far, 149 low-income transfer students from diverse socio-demographic backgrounds (30% Female, 61% First-generation college going, 44% Hispanic, 22% South East Asian) have participated in the scholarship program. To assess whether the transfer students receiving support through the scholarship program show improved retention and graduation rates, the retention and graduation rates of the transfer students enrolled in the program were compared to those of all transfer engineering students enrolled at the institution using institutional data. While the program is still ongoing, preliminary analyses indicate that the transfer students enrolled in the scholarship program showed higher retention and 2-year graduation rates compared to the overall transfer population at the institution. These findings provide a first indication that the scholarship program was successful in supporting low-income transfer students’ access, enriching their experiences and securing their retention in the engineering major.