Supporting Undergraduate Students in Bioscience and Applied Mathematics

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund four-year scholarships to 32 students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in Bioscience or Applied Mathematics. Both cohorts of 16 Scholars will experience a four-year plan of guidance, support, and academic challenge designed to keep them on track in their STEM majors and support their entry into STEM careers or STEM graduate programs. Some distinguishing features of this effort include: (1) a dedicated STEM counsellor who will teach the First Year Experience seminar for Scholars and will partner with faculty advisors to guide the Scholars through all four years of college; (2) supplemental collaborative learning workshops attached to foundational STEM courses; (3) optional community-building activities; and (4) one-on-one faculty-mentored research experiences in their majors. This project has the potential to contribute new knowledge about the role of need-based financial aid and other evidence-based practices in reducing attrition, promoting inclusion, and educating a diverse STEM-prepared workforce that will fuel the local and national economies. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Specific quantifiable objectives of this project include that the Scholars will: (1) maintain a 3.0 GPA; (2) have an 85% Year 1 to Year 2 retention rate at the College and in their STEM majors; (3) have 4-year and 6-year graduation rates that are 20% higher than the College's reported Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System rate; and (4) have a six-month post-graduation placement rate of 90% either in STEM jobs or STEM graduate programs. Scholars will be selected by applying a random number generator to the pool of eligible applicants. Such randomization will yield a treatment group of S-STEM scholarship recipients and a control group of eligible applicants who do not receive S-STEM scholarships. Performance by treatment and control group will be tracked and compared throughout the study. The basic research question of the project is: Can a second-tier public commuter institution replicate the methods of a Research 1 University for STEM students and produce significant gains in GPA, year-to-year retention, credit accumulation, graduation rates, and the pursuit of post-graduation academic/career pathways in STEM? The project will also collect demographic data and data from surveys and focus groups to examine the possible role of attitudinal differences (e.g., college adjustment, confidence in STEM), as well as the impact of key components of the project. Through quantitative and qualitative data, the relative contributions of various activities on the desired outcomes will be explored. The external evaluator will use a mixed-method research approach, to test and inform refinements of intervention attributes and the measures to assess them. Farmingdale State College is a second-tier public commuter institution with an undergraduate population of 10,000 students (94% commuter, 59% with financial aid, 44% minority, 44% first-generation college). Consequently, this study will contribute to research on broadening participation in STEM. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.