Intellectual Merit: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between (1) access to and use of STEM-related social, cultural, and economic "capital" (or resources) and (2) specific educational pathways in college for a group of academically talented, mostly minority young women who participated for 3 years in a high school program intended to spark and sustain their interest in engineering. The high school program, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE), was implemented in 10 public schools in 3 states (CO, IA, and OH), from 2006-2009. FREE began with 131 mostly urban, Latina, Black, Native American and Asian American girls who were strong students in math and science. The proposed study will follow all the young women who stayed in FREE during high school and their first post-high school year (n=81). In this group, 22% are pursuing engineering majors, 35% are in other STEM majors, 33% are pursuing non-STEM majors, and 10% are undecided. Pierre Bourdieu's "social capital" framework will be employed to analyze the capital the participants brought with them and will have used in college, including that gained in FREE, to pursue their college goals. The concept of "educational pathways" will be used to examine the dynamic interplay between institutional structures for pursuing college degrees, sources of support in college, and individual decisions and choices made in college. Data will include information about the young women's high school backgrounds, experiences and lives (observation; interviews; demographic, self-efficacy and social network surveys; Blackberry PIN, Messenger and email messages; website and Facebook postings) from the FREE project. Comparable new data will be collected about the women's college experiences through Facebook postings, interviews and surveys. The qualitative data will be analyzed by creating a coding scheme of a priori categories (based on the research questions) and in situ (emerging from the data) categories and managed with the ATLAS.ti software program. Survey data will be analyzed with descriptive statistics, and where survey questions have been drawn from national surveys, those data will be used to make national comparisons.
Broader Impacts: This research seeks to impact the broader education community and society as a whole by: illuminating the connections between forms of capital and choice for or against careers in engineering and other STEM fields; contributing to policies and programs for increasing diversity in STEM fields; involving non-privileged students in research related to their STEM circumstances and options; preparing graduate students in Education, Women's Studies, and STEM fields for research on education-related issues, particularly those involving under-represented populations; and widely disseminating results through diverse sources, such as peer-reviewed journals, STEM-oriented associations, the FREE website, college-oriented websites and magazines, local and national press, and speaking engagements.
The goals of this study were to examine the relationship between (1) access to and use of STEM-related social, cultural, and economic "capital" (or resources) and (2) specific educational pathways in college for a group of academically talented young women--most of whom were women of color--who participated for 3 years in a high school program intended to spark and sustain their interest in engineering. The high school program, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE), was implemented in 10 public schools in 3 states (CO, IA and OH), from 206 tp 2009 and included 132 diverse young women. The current study, FREE Pathways, followed for three more years all the young women (N=81) who stayed in FREE through their first year post-high school. In this group, 22% chose engineering majors, 35% chose other STEM majors, 33% chose non-STEM majors, and 10% were undecided or not in college in 2009-10. Pierre Bourdieu's "social capital" and Tara Yosso's "community cultural wealth" frameworks were used to analyze participants' college-going capital. The primary research question for this study was: How does STEM-related economic, social, and cultural capital brought to college, as well as gained and used in college, affect young women's persistence in engineering, non-engineering STEM, and on-STEM pathways in college? Data about the young women's backgrounds, high school expereinces, and college lives were collected through Facebook postings, face-to-face interviews, and online surveys. In our sample, 47% of those who started college in ingineering graduated with an engineering degree; 24% of those who started college in engineering graduated with a degree in a non-enginering STEM field; 79% of those who started college in non-engineering STEM fields graduated with these STEM degrees; and 68% of those who started college in non-STEM fields graduated in those fields. Overall, 54% of the young women in our sample graduated with a STEM degree. Much of the success in engineering was garnered by upper middle class, mostly white girls whose families had considerable financial resources (>$80,000 a year), social connections, and cultural knowledge that made it straightforward for the young women to assume they would go to good colleges and be successful there, regardless of major. Those who chose and stayed in non-engineering STEM fields were more likely to be from middle- or low-income families with much less college-going capital. The lower-income women, most of whom were women of color, who succeeded in non-engineering STEM, and one who succeeded in engineering, had to rely on financial resources from uncertain or inconsistent sources (competitive scholarships, federal grants, loans), social contacts facilitated by school personnel (faculty, advisors) and cultural capital acquired in school-based programs (courses, minority group support groups, scholarship-linked study groups). Although the sample was small, these outcomes are impressive and uncharacteristic for this population. We found that the determination of the young women and the greneral support of family and friends, enhanced by an attentive high school environment, including enrichment and on-going support from FREE, enabled the women to access and develop the capital they needed to pursue STEM in college. Once in college, however, they struggled to stay on course in STEM. For none was this a straightforward, seamless, or painless process. Even the privileged young women questioned their abilities in the face of pressure to be a woman in engineering and some science fields. For the young women of color from middle- and lower-income families, the erratic patchwork of economic, social, and cultural supports available for students like them presented a continuous obstacle course that had to be constantly negotiated. For most, sufficient economic capital was a constant worry, and the social and cultural capital with which they entered college was not sustaining throughout. New forms of social capital were necessary to access "high-impact practices" (internships, research assistantships, study abroad) correlated with college completion and entrance into the workforce. Non-traditional forms of cultural capital, especially aspirational, familial and navigational forms, were necessary to stay on track in the midst of difficulties, setbacks, and disappointments experienced by women of color. This research demonstrates that neither women nor minorities respond to eduction and career possibilities in engineering or science as a monolithic group. They do not decide for or against these fields solely because of financial support, social support, interest or motivation, or any of the other single factors that have received so much attention in the literature on women and minorities' underrepresentation in STEM. They do not all succeed for the same reasons or by the same pathways. The young women who succeeded in this study did so because they could--in various, complicated, and often tortuous ways (by mainstream standards)--find access, negotiate, manage, revise, and refine necessary college-going economic, social, and cultural resources as they proceeded through college in STEM. Further detailed analyses and comparisons of individual cases will permit us to identify salient patterns and critical junctures.
