Collaborative Research: New Pathways to STEM Careers in Southern Idaho

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at at Boise State University and two strategically located community colleges in Idaho, the College of Western Idaho and the College of Southern Idaho (a Hispanic-Serving Institution). The goal of this collaborative project is to form a higher education consortium across Southern Idaho that provides responsive recruiting, retention, and career pathways for engineering and computer science (ECS) students. Over its six year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 136 unique full-time students who are pursuing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Transfer students will received a 2-year scholarship at the partner community college of origin and will continue to be funded for their Bachelor’s degree at Boise State University.Toward this goal, this project establishes a cohort-based experience with scholarship support for financially eligible, academically talented students in ECS programs These institutions serve three of the counties with the largest Hispanic population percentage in the state as well as a significant proportion of the state’s low-income rural population. This collaborative project will develop new accessible pathways into ECS careers and create an educational ecosystem that provides opportunities for low-income students with demonstrated academic potential to pursue a rewarding ECS career. This approach will counter known constraints of the current pipeline metaphor including providing multiple access points and addressing leaks that result in students pivoting to programs outside of an ECS degree or leaving college altogether. Creating recruiting and retention pathways in these areas will help support underserved populations in Idaho.The project team will also leverage existing relationships developed through the state-wide Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) to create a CAES Scholars Consortium. The CAES Scholars Consortium will establish new pathways to attract and retain students and to increase and diversify participation of low-income students in the ECS workforce. This team will focus on approaches to recruitment, retention, and careers. The CAES Scholars will be a cohort model that is connected virtually through a common set of activities shared across the consortium partners across the state. Each cohort will participate in activities to build a professional community around students in ECS programs with close collaboration and mentorship from professionals working in the energy sector, such as the Idaho National Laboratory. In subsequent years, upper-class students will become peer mentors to help newer students navigate the challenges related to transitions along the pathways. The research component investigates how these new pathways will improve self-efficacy, in particular the relationship between ECS literacy and ECS identity, and subsequent ECS retention. It is hypothesized that a strong ECS identity, increases access to and improves retention through the transitions along the pathways. The project will also examine how student experiences and related professional identity formation differ among students with different pathways or initial institution enrollment.This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.