Scholarships and Supports to Increase Access to and Completion of Masters Degrees in Engineering

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. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund two-year scholarships to 36 students pursuing master's degrees in Boise State University's College of Engineering. These degrees include Civil, Mechanical, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Materials Science & Engineering. The College of Engineering has a high population of students with financial need who are first-generation and/or from rural backgrounds. Despite their interest, these students have not entered the graduate programs that award degrees in high demand by the region's industries. In addition, there is evidence that, at the graduate level, these student populations face a compounded, more challenging version of the barriers that they faced as undergraduates. By recruiting these undergraduates into graduate programs, providing financial support through scholarships, and building academic, cultural, and workforce readiness supports, this project has a high potential to broaden participation in STEM graduate programs and workplaces. If successful, the project will contribute to the Nation's innovation engine by tapping into a population of talented engineers who discount their potential as graduate students due to financially-motivated concerns.

The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving graduate students with demonstrated financial need. The project aims to increase student persistence to degree by linking scholarships with effective supporting curricular/co-curricular activities and high-impact intervention strategies, including academic mentoring, cultural/family events, community-building social programs, skills training, and workforce readiness support, including internships and entrepreneurship development. Research has shown that graduate students face compounded noncognitive factors that impose additional barriers to persistence. An additional barrier is that many graduate students have difficulty keeping up with the high pace and intensity of graduate studies, while balancing family responsibilities. This project aims to help fill the large knowledge gap about whether and how implementation of research-validated interventions that have positive impact on undergraduate STEM students affect graduate STEM student success. The project research activities will be grounded in the social science tradition with the goal of studying the project interventions' design and implementation. Using outcome metrics, surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups, the project will gather data about the effectiveness of different interventions in reducing barriers and improving student success. Results will be disseminated through publication in peer-reviewed STEM and general educational journals as well as presentations at conferences. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) 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.