Creating Institutional Bridges to Engineering for Underserved Populations: Examining Associate-to-Bachelor Engineering Programs

A major challenge in K-16 education is a prevalence of students who desire to pursue an undergraduate engineering degree, but are unprepared for the rigors of a post-secondary engineering curriculum. Many challenges with the high school-to-college transition in engineering are due to a lack of rigorous mathematical and technical education at the secondary level. This issue is particularly significant in secondary schools that serve traditionally underrepresented and underserved populations. One solution is for students to obtain an associate of science (AS) degree in an engineering related discipline from a community college (CC), and to then transition to an undergraduate institution for a bachelor of engineering (BE) degree. This approach allows students to fill in any academic gaps in learning during their secondary education, confirm their interest in engineering, while maintaining any requisite work or family obligations. Although this can be a successful model to an engineering bachelor degree, a lack of communication and coordination between the community college and senior college can result in classes not being transferred, missed registration periods, and semester gaps which can result in a lack of retention. To address these issues and create a straight forward pathway from AS to BE, between 2003-2009, The Grove School of Engineering (GSOE) at The City College of New York (CCNY) developed four AS/BE dual degree programs with each of two local CC, both of which serve large populations of underserved and underrepresented minorities. The current study revisits the progress of these programs, 13 years after the creation of the first AS/BE program, to investigate the degree of academic success in the program. Longitudinal data on the number of students enrolled, credits earned per semester, and average GPA will be examined. Best practices as well as continued challenges will be presented. Finally, we investigate how changes in the technological, financial, and socioeconomic/socio-political landscape over the past several years has impacted these programs and will offer revised best practices and recommendations on expanding AS/BE programs.