October 3, 2024 | By Carol Tate, Sophia Ouyang, and Andrea Beesley
The U.S. education system needs to prepare more students for career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Although the number of STEM graduates has more than doubled since 2001,1 this is not enough to meet increasing workforce demands. And despite efforts to increase the participation of women and Black, Hispanic, and Native American people in STEM, the field persistently remains largely made up of White and Asian men.
The National Science Foundation’s Eddie Bernice Johnson Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Sciences (INCLUDES) Initiative addresses STEM inclusion and workforce challenges at a national scale.
SRI has spent 6 years as the external evaluator of the STEM Core Expansion Alliance, an NSF INCLUDES-supported network of more than 30 community colleges using evidence-based practices to increase the number of underrepresented students entering STEM careers. Example practices include academic acceleration, cohort-based learning communities, contextualized learning, intensive student support, and integrated internships.
The linchpin of this model is the dedicated student support specialist at each community college. This person provides a variety of supports, from “intrusive” advising (going to students, rather than waiting for students to come to them) to helping students connect with campus services, access tutoring, and apply for internships. This combination of social and academic support, and the community of learners that the student support specialist helps to build, enables students who might not be able to persist through a difficult course of study to flourish in STEM.
Here’s what the student support specialist role looked like on two STEM Core campuses.
A Single Point of Contact: Central New Mexico Community College
Nora Mendoza supports the STEM Core cohort as one aspect of her position as academic program manager at Central New Mexico Community College (CNM). Mendoza brings varied experience to the role, with 12 years of academic advising, a math teaching background, and training as both an academic advisor and a financial coach. She draws on her broad expertise to help students with various needs, and sometimes, she told us, “My mom hat even goes on, too.”
One thing that makes the STEM Core experience unique, in Mendoza’s view, is that she serves as a single point of contact for students. “I do a lot of academic supports. I do a lot of social support, a lot of coaching,” she said. “I provide those wraparound services.” She pointed out that many CNM students work full-time jobs, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and balancing work and school can be very challenging. In a typical advisory office, students might meet with a different person each time they go in. That is not the case with Mendoza, who said students feel comfortable knowing that she will be the one to help them navigate whatever they are dealing with.
360-Degree Support: Community College of Aurora
Barbara Rollison supported STEM Core students at the Community College of Aurora (CCA) in Colorado. Rollison provided a range of supports guided by “The Grid” — a spreadsheet that brought all of a student’s important academic and personal information together in one place so she could go over it with them in their mandatory, monthly one-on-one meetings. She alerted students to scholarships and internships and promoted campus-based supports such as food banks, legal advice, and academic advising. She also advised students on how they could repair their GPAs and connected them with tutoring resources if needed.
Rollison’s goal was to provide 360-degree support — to make students aware of all the available opportunities and encourage them to go for them. She saw her job as not just imparting information, but “listening to the students, helping them work through an issue, giving them some counsel.” She told us that this kind of 360-degree support, along with the community of students, was what set the STEM Core experience apart from the regular program at CCA. “I think you’re just more connected with a group of students, your peers, and they are talking,” she said. “They’re doing these engineering projects together, and I just think it’s incredible.”
Building a STEM workforce that reflects the population of the United States, and is big enough to meet demands while offering well-paid jobs, requires more than just access and financial support. Administrators, professors, employers, and students themselves need to raise their expectations about what is possible to achieve, even for those who enter college underprepared for college-level math.
As the two examples above illustrate, STEM Core’s suite of supports helped increase persistence and success for these students. Looking across the network, the details of how intensive student supports are implemented matter a lot. When student support specialists have stable, full-time positions that are not contingent on occasional grant funding, they are much more prepared to recruit robust cohorts of students from groups underrepresented in STEM and meet the diverse needs of those students. Otherwise, they may have to piece together part-time work and remain unsure if they will have a job in each coming semester.
Providing wraparound student supports may be challenging when cohorts are larger and include students pursuing an array of different majors. As community colleges try to extend the benefits of these supports to more students, they will need to learn not only how to serve those who opt into intensive programs like STEM Core, but also how to entice a broader group of students into STEM and support their persistence.
Footnotes
This material is based upon work supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (INCLUDES #1834628). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.