Florida Pathways to Success: A Research University/Minority-Serving Community College Partnership to Enhance Retention and Diversity of Transfer Students

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The Microbiology and Cell Science (MCS) Department at the University of Florida (UF) will partner with Miami Dade College (MDC), a primarily two-year degree granting institution in Florida and the largest minority-serving institution in the country, through the Florida Pathways to Success project. This project will provide scholarships to 400 academically talented and low income students who are in the two-year to four-year transfer pathway in the life sciences. To address the challenges of rapidly rising costs of higher education, stagnating income levels, and a critical shortfall of a highly skilled and diverse STEM workforce, MCS and MDC designed an innovative hybrid online transfer program to increase the retention of students who, for financial, familial, or other reasons, cannot relocate to the UF campus to complete their four-year degree. Transfer students are a diverse student population with a higher proportion of underrepresented minorities (URM), first generation students, veterans, working parents, women, older students and low-income students than non-transfer student populations. Despite their intention to earn an undergraduate degree, very few two-year students are retained and complete the B.S. degree pathway. The Florida Pathways project will use a transfer model that brings the MCS curriculum to the students and should therefore increase access to B.S. degrees while decreasing cost of attendance. The intellectual merit will focus on research in biology education that contributes to the body of knowledge on the transfer pathway and distance education. Students in the online transfer track earn their two year A.A. degree from a community college and then transfer into UF as MCS majors. Over five years, this project will provide substantial scholarships to approximately 250 academically talented and low income students from MDC and 150 from other Florida community colleges. Students who are pre-transfer at MDC and/or post-transfer in the UF MCS program are eligible for support. In addition, Florida Pathways scholarship recipients will receive mentoring from faculty and will be eligible to participate in other evidence-based interventions such as peer-led tutoring and faculty-mentored summer research. MCS transfer students currently have graduation rates that are significantly lower than the rates of their non-transfer peers. This project aims to increase retention so that all MCS students, regardless of transfer status, graduate in a timely fashion, resulting in at least 60-90 B.S. degree graduates who otherwise would not have been retained in the STEM transfer pathway. The research will identify those academic and social factors that contribute to observed differences in retention and graduation rates. The analysis will be used to guide the design of future interventions for sustained success of our transfer population.