Dept. of Education: STEM & Articulation Grants

Hispanic-Serving Institutions grant offers opportunities for Latino students to transfer to UCSC

The five-year mission of the Cultivamos Excelencia Project is to motivate and retain Hispanic/Latino and other high-need students at SJCC to complete their bachelor’s degrees at UC Santa Cruz.

Where Melissa Nohemi Vergara grew up, outdoor recreation meant walking the concrete streets of East Los Angeles. At 15, she caught her first glimpse of wilderness during a Yosemite visit, and now, a decade later, she’s discovering her passions in the redwoods of UC Santa Cruz.

Long-range impact of Title V and HSI STEM funding at MSMU

Our Title V grants have significantly contributed to the creation of programs, technology, and pedagogies that are focused on meeting these crucial needs of our students.

Since the 1960s when MSMU acquired property in the urban center of Los Angeles, an increasing number of our students have been Latina/Latino, low-income, first generation, and often in need of support to develop basic learning skills. Closing the gap between Hispanic students and others has been an important challenge to be met, as we strive to prepared and graduate all our students for lucrative and worthwhile careers. Across our two campuses a large percentage of our students consistently need developmental work in basic academic skills. We received our first Title V grant in 2001 and also are now enjoying the benefits of a Title III STEM grant to address more of these academic needs. Our Title V grants have significantly contributed to the creation of programs, technology, and pedagogies that are focused on meeting these crucial needs of our students. Our Title V grant has supported new analysis tools that are helping us to understand where we can improve and strengthen student programs to further increase graduation and retention rates. Focused strategies such as the creation of mentoring programs, increased access to technology, transition centers, summer STEM workshops, summer two-week Introduction to College Skills Workshops, new software applications, tutoring in math, sciences and writing, and a GIS minor and new Geospatial Criminology major have all been supported by our Title V and HSI STEM grants. Our grants have significantly contributed to an intensified campus climate of academic research, career exploration and preparation, and active student interaction in the teaching/learning process. Our Studio Classrooms are bringing the excitement of in-class research, content creation, and technology together to make even the first year academic experience both relevant and engaging. Further, our students are being supported through peer, faculty, and staff mentoring to help them with writing, critical thinking, scholarship applications, and career exploration. More focus on engaging the students’ families has occurred, recognizing that student success is also a function of making their students’ college experience a family project rather than experiencing it as observers. Our first-year learning community, iComunidad has supported them with additional sources of mentoring, tutoring (with a Writing Specialist to help them with writing skills, scholarship applications, and research), career exploration, and campus social connections. At the institutional level, our new Tableau data analysis and reporting software has already become an invaluable tool in assessing program quality, student retention, faculty accountability, departmental performance, and demographics, to name only a few benefits. Our GIS minor and new Geospatial Criminology major is a product of the efforts of the faculty and staff supported by Title V and HSI STEM grants. The STEM grant is engaged in preparing students to succeed in math and science courses/majors, The goals of our Title V grant have been to increase graduation rates across majors, and employ new pedagogies that will both expose and engage them with research early on in their academic careers. These two parallel initiatives are changing the dynamics of learning campus-wide. Students from a range of disciplines are learning to think spatially as a way to visualize social issues, develop research designs, and be prepared to step into occupations that utilize the new cutting-edge technology of GIS. The broad reach of our combined grants is creating more inter-disciplinary collaborations across faculty from a range of areas such as Philosophy, Criminology, Film and Media, Biology, Gerontology, Nursing, Sociology, Business, and Social Work. Student interest in courses that reflect analytic skills such as Demographics, Cartography of Crime, and Gender & Media has increased.

HSI STEM Grant SUCCESS

“This is super-surprising! I can’t believe I did this. It was an amazing experience!” He added that he’s planning to transfer to the University of North Texas and eventually earn a master’s degree. “It was really cool to see how our progress paid off. We worked so hard, and we saw how our project worked. It’s inspiring!”

"Mountain View College (Dallas, TX) students are first community college interns to win award from Los Alamos National Laboratories"

The Impact of HSI STEM Grant Funding

The Department of Education released the names of the 91 Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in 11 states and Puerto Rico that earned one of the HSI STEM and Articulation grants that begin in Fiscal Year 2017. The total funded amount is over $92 million and represents a significant and much needed federal investment in HSIs.