RedShirt Transitional Program: Creating Engineering Capacity and Expanding Diversity through Strategic Partnerships

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This project, called the RedShirt Program, will directly admit disadvantaged, under-prepared high school graduates who demonstrate potential to be successful engineers, but fall short of meeting standard admissions criteria to engineering. The students will be welcomed and supported as real engineering students during their RedShirt year; which is the beginning of a program that can lead to completion of B.S. degrees in five years. A two week Summer Bridge program will focus on building community and developing leadership skills. During the first academic year, students will learn in small, cohort-based classes, and students who achieve pre-defined metrics in their RedShirt year continue in the college, following the standard curriculum enriched by a variety of supportive opportunities and activities. The curricula are informed by the science of learning, and every component of the pilot RedShirt project will be researched and measured. This project will unearth the key conceptual issues at the root of achievement gap and diversity barriers to determine appropriate research strategies which have the potential to double the diversity of most engineering colleges. The College of Engineering?s existing partnerships with two high schools and its summer diversity-centered workshops for rising high school seniors provide avenues for recruitment. Increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in engineering programs is vital to meeting the economic demands for a diverse engineering workforce. This program will leverage university/high school partnerships for the benefit of first-generation college-bound students, students from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, underrepresented minorities, women and rural students. Bold, replicable strategies are needed to augment the preparation of high-potential, underrepresented students so engineering colleges can serve the profession and nation more broadly. The RedShirt curriculum and programming strategies, once piloted and refined, are exportable to virtually any U.S. engineering college, increasing the potential that the intractable barriers for increasing diversity within engineering can be overcome, and providing a strategy for supplying the profession with a rich potential of students from all walks of life.