2+1 STEM Scholarship Program

Solano Community College, Fairfield CA

Investigators

Abstract

The United States faces a national need to increase significantly the number of American scientists and engineers. This NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) project at Solano Community College (SCC) will address this need and contribute to the national effort to produce more STEM graduates by providing financial, academic, and personal support to academically-talented and financially needy students across all STEM disciplines at SCC. This project will pursue an innovative and promising 2+1 program for which students at SCC majoring in a STEM area will receive two years of support if they maintain a 3.0 grade point average (GPA). In turn, they will be awarded an additional year of support to continue their study, if they transfer to a four-year institution to be a STEM major. SCC will award twenty-five (25) to thirty-five (35) scholarships per year. Likewise, the project will build on existing student support services and develop new ones for the scholars. The 2+1 STEM Scholarship Program at SCC will take a comprehensive approach and will have multiple interesting and creative components, which should not only be effective at SCC, but also have significant potential to serve as models for other institutions, especially community colleges. These components will include, but not be limited to: (i) offering S-STEM scholarships at high school graduations to recruit students who plan to major in a STEM discipline; (ii) providing multi-stage mentoring from peers to faculty members, with a particular approach to pairing first-generation college students with more advanced first-generation students; (iii) building partnerships with industry to provide more learning, internship, and career awareness opportunities for students, as well as to help improve curricula and meet industry needs; and (iv) providing financial and other support to S-STEM scholars who transfer as STEM majors to a four year institution. These initiatives will work in concert with existing support services at SCC. The investigators will explore and assess the effectiveness of the various components of the project, taken individually and in combination with each other. Their findings will add to the overall knowledge base of STEM education by providing a roadmap leading to successful student intervention strategies, especially related to understanding and improving the pipeline of students from high school through community colleges to four year institutions, many or whom are underrepresented minorities and/or rural and/or low income.