This historic Hispanic Serving Institution is acting as a strong conduit for students from local high schools to four year schools. Recruitment and retention efforts include concurrent enrollment in high school and college courses with credit available for both, a summer enrichment program and other remedial programs particularly in mathematics, opportunities for industry internships with local industry, and a mentoring program as well as workshops to help faculty gain mentoring skills.
Intellectual Merit: This project is based on successful pilot efforts to increase science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) major enrollment and retention. It is expanding the talent pool of STEM students by providing a proactive project that creatively utilizes the resources of a regional four-year college and of the local school districts. An underserved population of students, many of them minorities and with little financial resources, is receiving baccalaureate level training at minimal expense and in a culturally friendly environment.
Broader Impact: This project has specific activities designed to interest a local population to enroll in STEM related programs and to interest them in and prepare them for enrollment and graduation from affiliated four year schools. They are targeting as potential students not only high school students but also, through association with local unemployment offices, people who might be able to consider a STEM education as a pathway to a new career. This geographic area is among the poorest economic regions of the country and contributes heavily to the state's low standing in per capita income. The project is making strong efforts to make the local population aware of the potential of a STEM career and of the project's activities.
Northern New Mexico College ASPIRe Project objective was to increase the STEM enrollment from secondary school through the baccalaureate level from Rio Arriba County in New Mexico. By the end of the 2014 academic year, Northern’s ASPIRe services had been offered to approximately 300 students. The demographics distribution for the participant students was approximately 83% Hispanics, 5% Native American, 2% African American and 10% White. From those students, approximately 46% were female and 54% male. In this sense, this project has been a contributor to the national efforts to increase participation of minorities and women in STEM. The main activities of ASPIRe were designed to 1) prepare concurrently enrolled high school students for college-level conceptual analysis, critical thinking, problem solving, and to convey to them the value of experimental replication; 2) recruit college freshmen and sophomores with undeclared majors to consider STEM study by assisting them in career planning through seminars, field trips, and exposure to successful STEM scientist and engineers; (3) supplement college STEM curricula with programs aimed at counseling, mentoring, and tutoring students who are at risk in STEM courses; 4) instill a love of learning in the intellectually challenging STEM fields by sponsoring or supporting practice-oriented research projects in summer programs at NNMC. In order to achieve these goals, the ASPIRe project implemented several strategies that fell under two umbrellas: the Summer Accelerator STEM Program (SASP) and the College Academy in STEM Program (CASP). Under the SASP strategy, the college offered six STEM Summer Camps. The first three years targeted high school students, and the last three years targeted freshmen college students. The main focused of the Summer Camp was to provide an accelerator program to boost the Math skills of the students. The strategy focused on self-paced, software assisted, and individualized study plan per student. Under this strategy, 41% of the participant students were able to learn the material equivalent to one year of math in only six weeks and 53% learned the material equivalent to one semester of math in the same six weeks. Tracking of these students demonstrated no difference in their final grades on future Math courses compare to students who followed the traditional pathway. Under the CASP strategy, the college offered tutoring services, first year experiences to new freshmen students, STEM seminars, and advisement sessions. Except for the first year of the grant, the services were only provided to college students. The first year experiences activities were very successful; it consisted in exposing freshmen student to hands-on activities in the field. The activities were such that traditionally these activities would need be in their junior or senior year. After tracking the participant students for at least three semesters, the retention rate was 80%. This is very high comparable to the 50% rate of first year students. The main successful activities of the grant, the Math Accelerator Program and the First Year Experiences, have been institutionalized at the College and the activities will continue regardless of the expiration of the grant. From these efforts, two conference papers at the American Society of Engineering Education were published and two panels were presented at the STEP annual meetings. Finally, a great challenge for this project and its retention/graduation goals was the influence of an external factor: recent college tuition/fees increases (100% in 2011 and 20% in 2013) have negatively contributed to retention rates since many students either dropped because of lack of money or they changed to another institution. Recent figures show an overall college enrollment decrease of 25% in the last three years.
