STEM Pathways Implementation-Only Alliance: Central New York LSAMP Alliance (CNYLA)

Ithaca College, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program assists universities and colleges in diversifying the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce through their efforts at significantly increasing the number of students from historically underrepresented minority populations to successfully complete high-quality degree programs in STEM. The new Central New York LSAMP Alliance (CNYLA) STEM Pathways Implementation-Only (SPIO) projects consists of seven small two- and four-year colleges and universities in New York state (Ithaca College, Utica College, State University of New York at Cortland, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Tompkins Cortland Community College, and Herkimer County Community College). The alliance focuses on majors in natural sciences, math, and computer science programs to expand high-impact practices enabling historically underrepresented minority (URM) students to experience the maximum benefits of a STEM education in a small school environment. It also aims to strengthen transfer pathways to the STEM baccalaureate for URM students who begin at a community college. The project team hypothesizes that minority students will benefit from smaller school environments if given opportunities to experience improved faculty and peer relationships; mentoring; strong support for transfer between two-year and four-year schools; and early research experiences to develop a sense of identity, self-efficacy, and belonging in STEM. CNYLA activities will support URM students to succeed in a high-quality education as provided by smaller schools with a liberal arts focus. As evidenced by the quality of the STEM graduates from the alliance institutions, support that increases retention and graduation rates of URM students will increase the number of highly competitive persons of color in STEM fields, thus diversifying the perspectives needed to advance those fields. The alliance activities and shared resources will strengthen the partnerships between the member institutions and support a model of cooperation between smaller schools to improve efficiency while maintaining high-quality student support. The project will leverage faculty training and mentoring using best practices to increase faculty competency to support students from rural communities and change the classroom, lab, departmental, and institutional cultures to become more inclusive. Project results will be disseminated broadly via professional STEM conferences, scholarly publications, and especially to small liberal arts undergraduate institutions. 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.