Engaging Research Faculty in Community College Recruitment Activities

Introduction: Traditional university recruitment efforts are focused primarily on high school seniors. Even if community colleges are the starting point for many professional engineers, community college students are often under-served by higher education. Demographic data have shown a diverse population in community colleges. Potentially, tapping into the diverse demographics of the community colleges to recruit more students into 4-year STEM degree programs could have a significant impact on the overall diversity in the STEM workforce. This is essential as studies have shown that diversity leads to improved decision making, innovation, and good outcomes for businesses. Identifying the most effective means to inform local community college students about research and financial opportunities available at 4-year universities is critical to further bolster the transfer process and diversify the STEM student population. We hypothesize that there is a need to communicate and integrate research activities during student recruitment. The objectives of this study were to evaluate whether engaging research faculty in local community college recruitment activities inspired students’ interests in engineering research. Specifically, research faculty was sent to community college to foster collaboration with faculty and students in community college, and the faculty gave a seminar to students during their visit to directly convey information of engineering major and research opportunities in 4-year universities. We were especially interested in whether including research faculty’s ongoing research projects in the seminar addressed the lack of research exposure to community college students and bolstered their intention to transfer to 4-year universities after their associate degree.

Materials and

Methods: In this study, a research faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County visited community colleges in the State of Maryland several times in the past year to give a seminar to community college students and the faculty. Those students are either in a course or a students’ club in Science/Engineering programs. The seminar presentation included not only the traditional recruitment components such as description of the mechanical engineering undergraduate program, but also ongoing research projects conducted in the faculty’s research lab at UMBC. The research projects were focused on bioengineering, especially in applications in medicine. A survey was designed by the faculty member and it consisted of 15 questions asking about their demographic background, their previous exposure to research and research experience, the influence of the seminar on their interest in transfer to 4-year universities, and their satisfaction with the event. The students were informed of the confidentiality of the survey and voluntary participation on finishing the survey. The surveys were given to all participants after the events and were collected on-site. The IRB at UMBC has approved our research protocol involving human subjects. The collected surveys at the end of the visit were then analyzed to assess the impact of the visit.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: We collected 67 surveys after 4 visits to local community colleges, with 63 surveys with all the answers completed. Almost half were 1st year students, 34% were 2nd year students, while only 15% were in their 3rd year. More than 1/3 of the students stated their gender as female, 63% as male, and 3% as binary. The students in the survey were from diverse backgrounds, with 33% white, 30% Asian, 19% African American, and 4% Native American. In addition, 22% of the students stated that they were 1st generation college students.
Results show that prior exposure to research was low for the participants, around 22% before the faculty’s visit. More than 90% of the participants stated that they understood more of the technical contents of ongoing research projects than before the seminar. 88% of them stated they acquired more information on mechanical engineering programs. 54% or 58% of the students felt that they are more interested in transferring to UMBC or other 4-year universities, respectively. However, more than 35% of the students said their intention to transfer remained the same. One thing encouraging is that 82% of the students were satisfied with the visit and 91% of them would like to attend future seminars offered by research faculty. Students provided feedback such as including faculty from other engineering programs to visit and give seminars, and they asked questions on research opportunities available to community college students.
In summary, we found that arranging research faculty visits to community college still relied on personal connection with faculty members in the community colleges. The survey data indicated low research exposure in community college students due to limited engagement of research faculty in community college recruitment. The high percentages of the students who stated acquiring more information on mechanical engineering research and their elevated interest in transferring to 4-year universities suggested the positive impact of our visit. The satisfaction rate of 82% from the students further encouraged us to continue this approach to promote future collaboration with local community colleges to recruit students with diverse backgrounds.

Acknowledgements (Optional): This research was supported by an NSF Research HUB grant (DUE-2138188).