CAREER: Understanding and Transforming Engineering Education at Broad-Access Institutions

About This Grant

Over half of all American college students are low-income or come from families where neither parent has a bachelor's degrees (also known as 'first-generation students'). These low-income and first-generation students disproportionately enroll in broad-access institutions— colleges and universities that accept almost anyone who applies. These students graduate at rates that are half that of students who are not low-income or first-generation. They also end up with larger debt burdens and lower GPAs. Even though such students comprise the majority of American college students, engineering education researchers have paid little attention to them or the institutions where they enroll. This project aims to address that oversight by identifying ways that engineering faculty and staff can better support low-income and first-generation engineering students in broad-access institutions. This project will improve engineering education in broad-access institutions by studying how low-income and first-generation engineering students leverage their unique assets and achieve success in an educational system that has been slow to change to meet their needs. This project will directly impact the educational practices of engineering faculty and staff at broad-access institutions through participation in a community of practice, during which members will work to improve broad-access engineering programs around the United States. Findings from this project will help educators understand how to change their educational practices to better serve all students, particularly low-income and first-generation students. This work will help engineering programs at many different types of institutions develop asset-based strategies for supporting student success for all Americans. This project uses a three-phase research plan that explores how students leverage their assets (operationalized as funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth) to access the resources (social and cultural capital) needed for success within engineering. In Phase 1, it will use longitudinal interviews to understand the processes engineering students engage in to activate and convert their assets into forms of capital in order to succeed in engineering education and professional practice. In Phase 2, the project will explore how faculty and staff perceive the assets engineering students possess and how they believe students can best leverage those assets. In Phase 3, it will use these multiple data sources — engineering students, alumni, faculty, and staff — to create a case study of the experiences of low-income and first-generation students at one U.S. broad-access institution. The findings from this project will support efforts to make wide change within engineering departments serving low-income and first-generation students, particularly those that are broad-access. The research plan makes a significant theoretical contribution by combining funds of knowledge, community cultural wealth, and social/cultural capital to understand how students transmit, convert, activate, and contort their assets into engineering capital. The work's methodological contributions answer calls from leading scholars to improve our understanding of engineering students via one of the first uses of a longitudinal research design to study low-income and first-generation engineering students' and recent graduates' assets and capital; the inclusion of faculty and staff perspectives of student assets; and the selection of the research setting at a broad-access and minority-serving institution. 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.