Initiatives to financially, academically, and socially support underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines

Abstract

Attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines is still a struggle for academic universities across the nation. There has been curriculum reforms and many initiatives in higher education to make STEM programs more attractive to incoming freshmen. Along the same lines, some of greatest challenges faced by STEM workforce is the lack of diversity where the workplace is not well represented by underrepresented and/or disadvantaged populations. To address these challenges, academic institutions offering STEM programs are investing time and effort to increase and retain underrepresented STEM students by bringing in initiatives that would best serve the interest of these underrepresented groups. This paper describes such retention and recruitment initiates introduced at a state university which has seen a dramatic increase of Hispanic STEM students in the recent years and has historically high numbers of economically-disadvantaged and first-generation college students. A cohort of students were formed after careful evaluation of the candidate's profile according to a set of selection criteria. These were students in the engineering, computer science, and mathematics disciplines representing rural, economically disadvantaged students, minority, predominantly Hispanic students, and first-generation college students. This paper will highlight and evaluate the various initiatives adopted in this project to ensure the retention and graduation of this cohort of students. The impact of financial, academic, and social support given to the selected group of students will be discussed in this paper. Results from focus groups, surveys, and student testimonies collected from this project will be briefly discussed in this paper to the benefit of universities seeking ways to recruit, retain, and graduate underrepresented minority students in STEM disciplines.