UC Irvine Pathways to Engineering Collaborative

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With funding from the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, the "UC Irvine Pathways to Engineering Collaborative" project will support high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Irvine Valley College (IVC). Throughout its five years, this project will fund 360 scholarships for community college students who are pursuing engineering degrees with a specialization in advanced manufacturing. Recognizing the crucial need for partnerships between two-year institutions and universities in the advancement of students who pursue baccalaureate degrees in engineering, this S-STEM Track 3 project establishes an academic and counseling collaboration that includes co-advising, mentoring, and tutoring and establishes pathways to baccalaureate degrees in engineering. Drawing on Tinto's theory of student retention and Eccles Expectancy-Value theory to examine choice and success in engineering, the partner institutions will organize their project around five principle objectives. First, they seek to create an ecosystem of curricular and co-curricular supports to improve the transfer student experience. Second, they will increase the number of community college students who transfer and matriculate in engineering. Third, they plan to mentor these transfer students toward graduating with baccalaureate degrees in engineering with a special emphasis in advanced manufacturing. Fourth, the project team will aim to increase the number of these baccalaureate degree recipients who enter into the workforce or graduate school. Finally, the investigators will carry out their work with an eye toward contributing new knowledge on success in engineering through a multi-year mixed method longitudinal study. This multi-year mixed-methods study investigates the priorities, values, and experiences that shape academically talented low-income students' education choices and their will to succeed. The investigation is guided by the following overarching research question: "What drives academically talented, low-income engineering students, who begin their academic careers at community colleges, to succeed in engineering?"This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.