Scholarships to Enhance Southern New Jersey High-Tech Workforce

Rowan University, Glassboro NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The Scholarships to Enhance Southern New Jersey High-Tech Workforce at Rowan University provides scholarships for academically talented students in financial need who are pursing bachelor's degrees in engineering. The project is a multidisciplinary collaboration of the five engineering departments of the College of Engineering at Rowan. The scholarship program supports full-time students who meet financial need and academic merit criteria. A total of 30 scholarships are planned over a five-year period. The program allows Rowan to offer scholarships to directly address an area of national concern: the shortage of US graduates trained in STEM related fields. Scholarships for academically strong engineering students, who may not otherwise be able to afford college, have an impact on the number of engineering graduates prepared to help national, regional, and local companies. Talented engineering graduates will directly impact the Southern New Jersey high-tech workforce and help the US to compete and innovate in a global economy. This effort to enhance the Southern New Jersey high-tech workforce builds on resources available at Rowan University. The project utilizes Rowan's Engineering Learning Community (ELC). The ELC is modeled after research-based best practices for living and learning communities, which have been shown to enhance academic achievement, retention and educational attainment, especially for first year students. The ELC students pursue their academic curriculum with a blended co-curriculum involving a theme, concept, or common subject matter while living together in a reserved part of a residence hall. ELC faculty members and upper-level ELC students provide mentoring. Assessment and evaluation will provide insight into the retention benefits of student scholarships, living and learning communities, in-dorm student mentoring/tutoring, and faculty mentoring/advising. Lessons learned and effective practices that emerge from the program evaluation data will be disseminated widely to the engineering education community and help enlarge the knowledge base regarding attributes and practices of successful scholarship programs of this type.