Collaborative Research: STEM Education and Workforce Participation over the Life Cycle: The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Disability Status

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This collaborative research project will study the effects of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) skills and training gained from high school through college on the career-long learning prospects of diverse groups of individuals and their adaptation to changing workplace experiences. Project investigators at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will also contribute to the important research on STEM broadening participation issues, specifically the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender and disability with STEM education, STEM workforce development and STEM career success.The research team will conduct interviews with individuals who originally participated in a U.S. Department of Education survey called the High School and Beyond (HS&B) study. The students were high school seniors when the data was initially collected in 1980. Some of these students also provided additional survey data in 1982, 1984 and 1986. Beginning with this longitudinal survey data, the researchers will study the STEM training that students acquired and the STEM competencies they developed in school. Drawing on specific coursework, test scores, grades, degree attainment, and field of degree, the investigators will analyze how these competencies contribute to workforce success and flexibility in mid-life work for persons with diverse, intersecting attributes defined by race, ethnicity, gender and disability. The new data set will be made available to the public and to researchers through the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. The project will use a large population sample, combining data from the sophomore and senior cohorts of the HS&B study, in order to conduct theoretically grounded analytic modeling about the relationships between STEM training, workforce outcomes and diversity attributes. The main theoretical focus of the work is examining the relative contributions of education as credentials (signaling theory) versus the relative contributions of what is learned in school and non-school settings (human capital theory).