Identifying Barriers to Recruiting Low-Income Students into Engineering Master's Programs

The purpose of this paper is to present lessons learned from a recently established NSF S-STEM program focused on creating pathways to master's degrees for low-income engineering students. This population is particularly interesting, because students from income backgrounds who have earned bachelor's degrees may be eager to enter the engineering workforce. However, in many engineering disciplines, individuals have more earning potential and career trajectory options with a master's degree. In this paper, we identify several categories of barriers and lessons learned to launching an S-STEM focused on graduate students at a large R1 public institution that may be useful to other such programs. These include discussions on recruitment of this specialized population of students into graduate school, especially those from other institutions, can be difficult because i) there are structural and legal barriers to accessing financial information about students to identify low-income students and ii) smaller institutions may not have the student support resources to effectively prepare undergraduate students for future research-based advanced degrees in engineering at large universities. By formalizing the issues facing student-centric graduate education and providing some context for how our program is overcoming these barriers, more stakeholders can be aware of barriers that impede broadening participation in graduate-level engineering education to accelerate progress in similar initiatives.