This project is being supported under a special funding focus for STEP, "Graduate 10K+," an activity of the National Science Foundation, supported in part by donations from the Intel Foundation and the GE Foundation, to stimulate comprehensive action at universities and colleges to help increase the annual number of new B.S. graduates in engineering and computer science by 10,000 over the next decade.
California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and Hartnell College have assessed the challenges facing underrepresented and disadvantaged students seeking educational opportunities in computer science. Given the obstacles and the resources available, CSUMB and Hartnell committed to developing a three-year bachelor's degree option coupled with significant student support structures and financial assistance as a way to improve outcomes.
The project is incorporating the following features: o Collaboration between a 2- and 4- year college, in which students are completing the first 1.5 years of the program primarily at Hartnell and the final 1.5 years primarily at CSUMB; o Improving the college-readiness of students through a summer bridge program; o Organizing students into cohorts that are maintained from enrollment through transfer and graduation; o Providing ongoing academic support through identification of academic needs and provision of support services; o Delivering career development support through workshops and internship placements; o Providing scholarship support that eliminates the need for students to seek outside employment. o Executing a detailed evaluation plan with an external evaluator to study the performance of project components.
Additionally, the project has secured a commitment from the Matsui Foundation, a local non-profit organization, to provide significant funding that supports full scholarships for students.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in its implementation of a three-year Bachelor of Science degree program in computer science/information technology (CSIT) to successfully attract, retain, transfer, and graduate students from disadvantaged and underrepresented populations. The project incorporates three critical components: (1) an accelerated three-year time frame, (2) collaboration between a community college and a university, and (3) a cohort-based learning model.
The project's broader impacts are felt in the increased access to computer science and success of 150 underrepresented and disadvantaged students, through the combination of an accelerated program, student scholarships, student cohorts, and leveraging computer science support programs. Dissemination of evaluation data and best practices from this project are also providing substantial information to education leaders to duplicate collaborative three or four year pathways that utilize resources of multiple institutions to increase retention and graduation of students in computer science and STEM.
