Introduction
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.
Background
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:
ā¢ āElements of underserved, STEM student success are locked into separate silosā;
ā¢ The specific types of interventionsāmatter less than the integration of multiple support programsā and the presence of aāunified community of support,āand finally;
ā¢ āCollaboration is the most important aspect of a smooth implementation process.ā
Methodology
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
STEM Success Collaborative
Project number P031S2210228