Engineering Student Development And Retention Strategies At A Historically Black University

Student retention and completion of degrees in the STEM areas are issues that higher education institutions have been dealing with for quite sometime. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) also have their share of issues with STEM-student development, retention and completion of degrees. Various approaches have been adopted by educators and researches to alleviate the STEM-student development, retention and graduation problems. Unfortunately, the retention rates and graduation rates are still lower than desired. There is a need to continue to re-asses and re-evaluate previous efforts and to investigate and research alternative or additional methods and techniques to enhance student development, retention and graduation rates in the STEM disciplines at HBCUs. In this paper, the engineering student development and retention strategies at Bethune-Cookman University, a Historically Black University are discussed and compared with strategies at other institutions of higher education.