2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Many recent efforts in the U.S. have focused on STEM workforce development (SWD) to meet industry demands and increase access to education and career pathways, ultimately leading to improved individual, community, and national economic outcomes. These efforts often require partnerships and collaboration between different stakeholders across sectors and organizations. This is particularly true in rural areas across the U.S., especially given more recent federal, state, and local commitments to rural SWD, making it an appropriate context for understanding collaboration efforts. Rural regions also often have highly specialized industries directly related to workforce opportunities in which many different stakeholders might connect and intersect. Additionally, SWD efforts can expand rural communities’ access to STEM education and career pathways, which are often challenging for rural students to pursue; however, in the absence of local career opportunities, this may lead to the outmigration of community members to pursue career opportunities elsewhere. Rural SWD contexts span systems, stakeholders, priorities, and challenges, but little is understood about collaboration between stakeholders and stakeholders’ perspectives on the purpose and collaborative nature in these rural contexts.

Using a conceptual framework informed by theories of collaboration and systems thinking to illuminate the scope of and principles guiding multistakeholder collaboration on complex problems, the purpose of this research is to explore the stakeholder perspectives on the collaborative nature of rural SWD. This work-in-progress paper is part of an ongoing project that aims to illuminate perspectives from stakeholders involved in rural SWD, including those in formal and informal education, industry, economic development, community development, and policy. This paper will present preliminary findings from thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with six stakeholders representing higher education institutions and nonprofit organizations spanning a variety of focuses and efforts. Preliminary findings suggest that an understanding of place-based contexts is crucial for defining problems and needs, and implementing solutions to support the rural STEM workforce, and that resources must be leveraged differently across rural areas to achieve SWD goals. Findings from this research will contribute to SWD literature in engineering education and will provide recommendations for collaborations across SWD contexts.