Profiles of Technical Workforce Programs and Students at Two-Year Colleges

American Society For Engineering Education, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

To maintain and expand the nation’s skilled technical workforce, it is essential to understand how technician education programs at two-year institutions support students’ academic and career pathways. However, significant gaps exist in the data needed to build this understanding. To address this gap, this project will develop and test a centralized system to collect the needed data. It will also develop a state-of-the-art visualization system to display and explore this data. These resources are intended to: (a) support peer, regional, national, and impact analyses of engineering-oriented technician programs; (b) make data available to federal and state agencies and researchers focused on STEM workforce issues; and (c) create a national digital directory of engineering-oriented technician programs at two-year colleges. This effort builds on the American Society for Engineering’s Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges Survey, which focuses on programs at four-year institutions. In addition, it responds to the National Science Board’s call for filling such data gaps, described in its report: The Skilled Technical Workforce: Crafting America’s Science and Engineering Enterprise. The goals of the project are to: (1) develop and test a survey instrument and administration process for standardizing and collecting information on engineering-oriented technician programs at two-year institutions; (2) augment primary data collection with existing data sources; (3) design a common taxonomy and directory describing the types of two-year engineering degrees and certificates offered nationally; and (4) create and maintain an interactive data visualization system to analyze engineering-oriented technician programs at two-year institutions for peer, regional, and national comparisons. The project will implement a centralized data gathering effort that includes survey design/administration, sampling, and item analyses for reliability and validity. Additional data acquisition activities include linking existing data files to other data repositories and to primary survey data, including development of the algorithms required to accomplish linking of these independent data sources. Data visualization activities include the use data analytics and other approaches to facilitate the understanding of large, complex data sets. A national Advisory Board will guide project activities and evaluate their impact. This project is funded by the Advanced Technological Education program that focuses on the education of technicians for the advanced-technology fields that drive the nation's economy. 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.