Collaborative Research: 2+3 Community College to Graduate Engineering Degree Program: An Innovative Pilot Model for Broadened Pathways Into Engineering Careers

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This engineering education research award to Norfolk State University, in partnership with Central Virginia Community College, Northern Virginia Community College, Thomas Nelson Community College, and Tidewater Community College will support research to pilot the establishment of an innovative program to leverage the community college pathway into the engineering profession. Students completing a 2+3 community college to university program would receive three post-secondary degrees: the associate degree in engineering, the bachelor of science in engineering, and the master of science in engineering. This pilot program will target two primary audiences. First, the program will be tailored and marketed to military veterans who wish to complete their educational training using support from the newly implemented Post 9/11 GI-Bill program. Second, the program will be marketed to high school students through a popular team-based robotics program that has a good record of attracting students into engineering. Project activities are organized into five general categories: curricular coherence; academic enrichment; mentoring, advising, and support services; community building and networking; and assessment and evaluation. Planning phase activities will explore strategies that have been identified in prior studies on military students and on community college pathways into engineering as a guide for the program design. The project team will consider methods to better synchronize curricular and course offerings.and will work to develop institutionalized assessment mechanisms that can be used to collect useful statistics on student performance and success factors. The final project report will include an overview of the student and program performance, and it will outline strategies for effective dissemination to other community college and four-year campuses. Analogous to the three plus two undergraduate programs that bridge physics, math, and science students attending liberal arts universities into an engineering discipline, this program is expected to be a model for attracting a larger pool of students into the engineering profession. It will provide models for alternate pathways that can increase the number and diversity of engineering graduates needed for a competitive national workforce.