The untapped community: Community colleges as an opportunity to broaden participation in engineering

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By the year 2022, the demand for engineers is projected to exceed their anticipated graduation from degree programs by 1 million. With the shifting demographics of the country, there is also an imperative need to attract women and people from groups traditionally underrepresented in engineering to address this workforce shortage. Community colleges are well suited to be a resource in these efforts with the potential to increase both the number and diversity of such qualified engineers. Although community colleges have received much attention in recent years, little is known about the experiences of community college engineering students as they complete their coursework at the community college and transfer to the next stage of their life (e.g., accredited engineering program or their career). As this time period critically influences students' chosen pathways to engineering careers, this study seeks to understand the lived and told experiences of community college engineering students, specifically focusing on those from underrepresented groups (URGs). As this is a budding, diverse pool of talent with promise in meeting the workforce needs, this project has the potential to uncover barriers and catalysts that URGs experience as they progress in their education in multiple contexts. This project involves diverse community college programs spanning three U.S. Census regions, which could inform both community college programs and four-year institutions across the country. This work also leverages the progress of prior National Science Foundation investments in community colleges while addressing issues of social justice such as inequity and exclusion, which are perpetuated when pathways to Bachelor's degrees are less accessible for particular groups of students - here, community college students. Specifically, the project will address the following research questions: RQ1: What are the lived and told stories of community college engineering students from URGs? RQ2: How do URG community college students' understandings of their experiences and the relationship of those experiences to the environment influence their plans for future education and careers? RQ3: In what ways, if any, do community college engineering students' narratives bring to light issues of oppression, privilege and inequality? In this narrative inquiry project, the project will conduct a series of in-depth interviews with participants from underrepresented groups at three community college systems in Virginia, Texas, and Arizona, where the selected institutions each serve large numbers of students from underrepresented groups. These community colleges were chosen intentionally as they have close proximity to and/or articulation agreements with four-year institutions with engineering programs. Gaining a better understanding of student experiences promises to enable proactive development of strategies to position and prepare students to pursue four-year degrees from the inception of their studies at community colleges. Moreover, findings from this study promise to shed light on why existing efforts to increase transfer rates to four-year institutions have had limited effectiveness, which could inform academia, industry, and government.