MCC STEM Scholarship Program

Mchenry County College, Crystal Lake IL

Investigators

Abstract

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, McHenry County College (MCC) will provide scholarships and evidence-based support services to academically talented low-income students pursuing and completing STEM degrees. Three goals animate the design of this project. The first is to increase the diversity of students pursuing STEM disciplines. The second is to increase retention and completion of the MCC STEM Scholars. The third is to generate knowledge about specific ways project activities and other relevant factors influence the educational experiences and success of the scholarship recipients. Towards these goals the project's principal investigators will carry out a holistic and systematic range of activities. Such activities will include on-site outreach and recruitment efforts at area high schools with significant minority and low-income populations, on-going individual and cohort-based experiences designed to promote retention and student success, and embedded knowledge-generating efforts guided by a partnership between MCC and university researchers. Although community colleges possess a large pool of potential STEM talent, greater supports are needed to ensure that they can place their students on a promising path toward success, especially low-income students. Recent evidence has suggested that holistic, rather than singular approaches to student support offer greater benefits to community college student retention and completion. At the same time, while research has demonstrated the positive impact of multiple services and supports on community college student success, there remains limited evidence on precisely how and why such approaches work. Exploring such efforts can help identify the most effective strategies to improve student persistence and completion in STEM. This project not only integrates a variety of supports to assist community college students in succeeding in STEM, particularly those who are low-income and academically talented, but also examines how such efforts work and why. The empirical knowledge derived from the embedded research, assessment, and evaluation will inform small (and typically under-resourced) community colleges on how to reconcile and coordinate various institutional supports, as well as on how to institutionalize and sustain cost-effective, collaborative efforts to assist academically talented low-income STEM 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.