Collaborations With Non Metropolitan Community Colleges

Mary Anderson-Rowland, Anita Grierson
2009 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings   unpublished
of Women Engineers. Her awards are based on her mentoring of students, especially women and underrepresented minority students, and her research in the areas of recruitment and retention. A SWE and ASEE Fellow, she is a frequent speaker on career opportunities and diversity in engineering. Abstract As the need for more engineers in the United States is becoming critical, the community College (CC) is becoming more important as a place to begin the nurture of more students who will choose
more » ... ring or computer science as a career. The Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU) accepts about 300 transfers each year. Our research has shown that about half of these CC transfers decided on engineering or computer science (hereafter just referred to as engineering) after they were at the CC. Therefore there is great potential in working with a CC and the high school students local to that college to inform and to encourage these students to consider engineering as their major. Since women and underrepresented minority students are over represented in the CCs compared with four-year institutions, collaborations with CCs also has the potential of increasing engineering diversity. The Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering has worked with six local metropolitan community CCs for the past six years in encouraging students to select engineering as their major and to remain in engineering. We support the transfer student through an orientation and a special center for CC students on the ASU campus. We employ successful transfer students in the center who act as resource people for new transfer students. The center also provides workshops to help transfer students. We also have an academic scholarship program (funded by the National Science Foundation: CSEMS grant # 0324212 and then S-STEM grant # 0728695) for transfer students which has resulted in a retention and graduation rate of over 90%.
doi:10.18260/1-2--5766 fatcat:fscfseqvzrhl3fbnajbmklefgu