City Tech’s STEM Success Collaborative is a five-year project that started in September 2021. It is funded under the US Department of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions program.

The project seeks to improve retention, graduation, and workforce readiness of Hispanic and low-income STEM-interested students by strengthening and coordinating academic and support programs for students in their first two years of study. Here, STEM is defined broadly to include the health sciences.

A guiding rational and conceptual inspiration for the STEM Success Collaborative is a project implemented at eight California State University campuses focused on increasing success for first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students in STEM.

Among the key findings¹:
• “Elements of underserved, STEM student success are locked into separate silos”;
• The specific types of interventions“matter less than the integration of multiple support programs” and the presence of a“unified community of support,”and finally;
• “Collaboration is the most important aspect of a smooth implementation process.”

The California initiative suggests that educational equity for Hispanic and low-income students highly depends on a genuinely integrated and collaborative institutional context.

Guided by this model, City Tech’s STEM Success Collaborative has launched a set of collaborative, integrative initiatives organized under three broad strategy areas: 
1)Academic Resources; 
2)Student Support Resources; and 
3)Institutional Resources

¹Holcombe, E. M., & Kezar, A. (2020). Exploring the Organizational Value of Integrated Transition Programs for Underrepresented College Students.
Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 1-14.
https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2020.1726358