The Two- to Four-year Institutional Pathway to STEM Degrees: An Empirical Study of Broadening Participation in STEM

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Given their accessibility and affordability, community colleges attract high numbers of minority, low-income, and first-generation students. Despite their potential to diversify the STEM workforce, few studies have sought to capture how community colleges serve underrepresented students in STEM courses and degree programs. Further, there is a limited understanding of what leads underrepresented community college students to transfer to and attain STEM degrees from four-year institutions. Taking a systems-level approach to broadening participation, this project asks, "How do diverse students successfully navigate two- to four-year institutional pathways in STEM and what are the institutional practices and resources that support their progress through to bachelor degree attainment?" It aims to answer this question by developing descriptive case studies of three pairs of two- and four-year institutions with transfer and degree completion rates that surpass their comparable peers. In short, it uses models of success to understand what keeps diverse students in the STEM educational pipeline.Grounded in practice theory, which focuses on interactions between individuals and institutions, the project uses mixed methods (e.g., interviews, surveys, academic transcript records and artifacts such as course catalogs) to: (a) Investigate the institutional practices that support transfer and persistence in STEM; (b) Track community college STEM students' pathways to transfer and follow through in a four-year institution; and (c) Compare the experiences, identity development and persistence of transfer and non-transfer students pursuing bachelor's degrees in STEM. Practically, by describing how students navigate transfer pathways and institutional systems to succeed in STEM and identifying the array of resources they draw on to succeed, the project can inform the development of practices and interventions that are sensitive to the needs of diverse students, both in and out of the classroom. Intellectually, the study aims to develop actionable theories and explanations for diverse students' transfer in STEM undergraduate education by identifying the explicit and implicit institutional practices, resources, and policies that facilitate STEM transfer. This project exemplifies the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's commitment to fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts.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.