Leveraging S-STEM Scholarship programs

In response to our nation's cry for more engineers, this paper describes how a major university has leveraged four NSF program grants to produce a highly successful program focused on retention, graduation, and graduate degrees. One of the programs is for lower division students, one is for upper division transfer students, one is for non-transfer upper division students and graduate students that have come up through the system, and one is for upper division students who come from five selected non-metropolitan community colleges in Arizona. The last program ties everything all together with a Transfer Student Center, a place for the S-STEM Academic Scholarship Success Class to meet, a place to host potential transfer students, and a place for transfer students to study and network. An emphasis of all of these programs is the encouragement and support of female and underrepresented minority students and students with unmet financial need. These programs have attained a 90-95% retention rate. For upper division transfer students not in the program, the graduation rate is about 70% for males and 64% for females. The transfer GPA shock was shown to be negligent for new program transfer students, compared with a half grade point drop for new upper division transfer students not in the program. Most importantly, during the past three years over 50% of the graduated scholarship students have gone right on to graduate school full-time. Seventy percent of the transfer students who did not intend to go to graduate school when they matriculated to Arizona State University, but who have now chosen to go on to graduate school, have reported that this program was a major influence in this decision change. Several of the students are now in PhD programs preparing to become professors. Even though parts of this program have been in existence for nearly 10 years, this is a continual work in progress as we strive for more excellence. This paper highlights the successes of being able to leverage four NSF grants. We also discuss areas which are still challenging.