Urban Sustainability Engineering Fellows: Catalyzing Cultural Transformation in Matriculation Pathways from Community College to Bachelor's Degree Completion

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This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need. Over its five-year duration, the project will fund four-year scholarships to 56 students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Metropolitan Community College. The scholarships will support the Scholars' pursuit of bachelor's degrees in mechanical or civil engineering. The project will seek to offer a well-rounded scholarship program that supports successful transition of students from Metropolitan Community College into the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The program will be designed to develop a culture of inclusive participation within the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering and enhance the success of urban students in obtaining bachelor's degrees in engineering.The overall goal of the project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. This program will include three integrated components focused on issues related to the urban core of Kansas City, which includes Metropolitan Community College, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the Kansas City Public School District. The curricular component will include Mindset Calculus Labs I and II, Introduction to Engineering Research, Cornerstone Design to Renew the Urban Core, and Capstone Design to Renew the Urban Core. The co-curricular support component will include research and leadership experiences. The cultural support component will include student-led governance, close collaboration with industry and urban community stakeholders, inter- and intra-cohort shared experiences, and faculty reflection on student-centered pedagogies. The individual program components will be organized around a unifying them of supporting the urban core of Kansas City. Data will be collected to conduct a longitudinal, mixed-method analysis of change in departmental culture from the student, faculty, staff, and administrative perspective. The change in persistence, engineering identity, engineering career aspiration, and academic motivation of urban community college engineering transfer students will also be analyzed. Matriculation of engineering students from community colleges to four-year institutions is a pathway with great potential to increase equity in STEM higher education. The comprehensive strategy developed in this project may provide a model for sustaining successful matriculation and graduation of transfer students that could be adopted by other urban institutions of higher learning. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.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.