Understanding and Supporting the Whole Student: An NSF S-STEM-NET Hub

Education Northwest, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

This S-STEM Hub will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by creating a better understanding of how postsecondary institutions and state agencies across multiple sectors (education, workforce, housing, health, and human services) can support domestic low-income STEM college students to achieve their goals. An additional focus of the hub's work is also to ensure access and inclusion while addressing changing learning needs. Over five years, Education Northwest, in partnership with Washington State, will reveal new and actionable information about low-income students in STEM and how publicly funded housing, health, and human services programming can address their needs. The Hub will bring together diverse STEM stakeholders across sectors to move from data to action, changing how practitioners and policymakers think about broadening supports for low-income students to improve their STEM enrollment, retention, and completion. The Hub will also model how other states (and the federal government) can think about using data to improve STEM success for low-income students. The overall goal of the project is to increase degree completion of low-income undergraduates in STEM fields. This project aims to uncover aspects of low-income students’ lives that are often invisible to the college faculty and staff members who support them. In some cases, means-tested housing, health, and human services programs provide a critical safety net that supports college-going and completion; in other cases, those public benefits programs undermine academic success. This project will address questions about how publicly-funded housing, health, and human services programming can support the success of low-income students in STEM. To do so, Hub partners will collaborate to build an integrated data system, linking education, workforce, and housing, health, and human services data. Hub research and will undertake research to investigate Washington students’ experiences with and use of publicly funded housing, health, and human services programming and how this relates to their access to and success in postsecondary STEM pathways. In collaboration with Washington community colleges and public universities, the Hub will also use a rigorous experimental design to research how connecting low-income STEM students to housing, health, and human services programming impacts their success in STEM. This project has the potential to advance understanding of broadening supports for low-income students in STEM through publicly funded housing, health, and human services programming. To share the findings with the STEM research and practice communities, the Hub will produce a rich mix of products, including white papers, practitioner briefs, infographics, and other user-friendly dissemination materials that highlight how to approach students’ housing, health, and human services needs, ultimately improving their success in STEM pathways. The Hub will also produce a toolkit that explains how its integrated data system could be replicated elsewhere. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income 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.