East Carolina University’s College of Engineering and Technology has received a grant that will support low-income students pursuing undergraduate engineering degrees, including students at Wayne Community College.
The $4 million grant is from the National Science Foundation Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Program (S-STEM).
The grant will provide scholarships to 80 students total — a cohort of 40 students beginning in the fall semester of 2020 and a cohort of 40 more in the fall of 2021.
Half of each cohort will begin as freshmen at ECU, while the other half will be distributed among three community college partners — Pitt Community College, Lenoir Community College, and Wayne Community College. Those students will complete their first two years of study at their respective community colleges with the intention to transfer to ECU to complete their degrees.
“Wayne Community College is excited to collaborate with East Carolina University to support students who want to enter engineering careers,” said Dr. Patty Pfeiffer, WCC vice president for academic and student services. “The NSF grant provides the opportunity to create a co-curricular model that can provide the support needed to help a student achieve their dreams of becoming an engineer.”
“Over a four-year period, Wayne Community College will receive over $114,000 which will include scholarships, participation support, and other costs,” Pfeiffer said.
ECU students with demonstrated financial need will be eligible for up to $10,000 per year, while community college students can receive up to $3,000 per year. That means that five WCC engineering students will receive scholarships the first year and five more will receive scholarships the second year.
“If those WCC students transfer to ECU’s College of Engineering and Technology, their scholarships will continue at $10,000 per year for two more years,” Pfeiffer explained.
In addition to scholarships, the grant will allow WCC to purchase sets of textbooks to create an engineering-specific lending library for students who may not be able to afford books and a tablet computer for each community college that can be used for remote tutoring, which will allow WCC students to have access to ECU tutors
“I’m incredibly excited about this award because there are such amazing opportunities to build pipelines of students into STEM degrees,” said Dr. Harry Ploehn, dean of ECU’s College of Engineering and Technology. “This exemplifies the kind of thing that we want to do here at ECU, to help provide the workforce for the region, to help students succeed and thrive, and to help lead regional transformation in eastern North Carolina.”
The program is called Providing Inclusive Residential and Transfer Experience Scholarships (PIRATES) in Engineering.
It establishes a consortium among ECU and the community colleges with the common goal of supporting low-income students not only with scholarships, but also High Impact Practices (HIPs). These include faculty interaction, mentors, tutors, job-shadow opportunities, career counseling, professional networking, extracurricular activities, and team building. A research component will track the success of the program with a goal of long-term sustainability.
One of the goals of PIRATES is to contribute to the understanding of barriers that exist for low-income college students and the best practices that can be used to help students overcome those barriers.
Pfeiffer said that ECU will use grant funds to hire three graduate assistants who will work with the three community colleges’ advising centers. One of the graduate assistants will be a direct liaison between ECU Engineering and WCC. The graduate assistants will support the effort to provide the most up-to-date transfer requirements and help students develop a plan of study leading to a successful transfer.
“If you go out in eastern North Carolina, we have so many communities that have financial constraints where there are limited opportunities,” said Dr. Ricky Castles, associate professor in ECU’s Department of Engineering and the lead principal investigator on the grant.
“We see this as an opportunity to make a financial impact on our region, to be able to enable students to attend college who may not be able to afford it otherwise. A lot of students are just not aware of the engineering opportunities that exist in eastern North Carolina or see it as a possible career path,” Castles said.
Another goal is to foster relationships between community college students and university students and faculty before the community college students matriculate to ECU. The aim is to improve persistence into a four-year degree program, increase retention in both the two-year and four-year degree programs, and lead to improved educational outcomes for transfer students.
Some ways those relationships will be built include activities involving professional development, career speakers, study skills development, social activities, a job-shadowing program with an engineer. The grant will cover travel costs for participation in activities at ECU.
Research results from the program are expected to be presented at a future American Society for Engineering Education conference.
“For the research part of it, we’re studying students in general, but especially transfer students, and what that experience is like for them coming to the university and the program that is trying to support them in that transition,” said Dr. Chris Venters, associate professor in the Department of Engineering and the co-principal investigator, who will lead the engineering education research piece of the project.
Castles said the goal is for the program to go beyond the life of the grant.
“This is a five-year project, but our goal with the research component is to identify needs and the best ways to support students in ways that are sustainable for a very long time in terms of helping this region and bringing in engineering students to help them learn,” Castles said.
Venters said many played a role in helping ECU receive the grant, and many will also play a role in making the program successful.
“The support that we’ve gotten to do this has just been incredible,” Venters said. “From other faculty in our department, from our industrial advisory board, it’s really been a large group of people who wanted to see this happen. We’re very thankful for that.”
Castles said the project can change lives forever.
“We want this to have a generational transformation in their family structure,” Castles said. “We’ve seen for years in engineering at ECU that so many of our students are the first ones in their families to go to college. They know what it means, especially when they come out after graduation and their starting salary may be more than their parents ever made in their entire lives. That changes the pathway for their family and their children, and hopefully the community as well.”
About WCC
Wayne Community College is a public, learning-centered institution with an open-door admission policy located in Goldsboro, N.C. As it works to develop a highly skilled and competitive workforce, the college serves 12,000 individuals annually as well as businesses, industry, and community organizations with high quality, affordable, accessible learning opportunities, including more than 100 college credit programs. WCC’s mission is to meet the educational, training, and cultural needs of the communities it serves. Connect with WCC at waynecc.edu.
About ECU
East Carolina University, or ECU as it’s best known, offers more than 85 bachelor’s, 72 master’s and 19 doctoral degrees to nearly 29,000 students on its Greenville, North Carolina, campus and through an acclaimed online learning program.
The Department of Engineering, which resides in the School of Engineering and Technology, is accredited by the ABET, Inc. Engineering Accreditation Commission. It has approximately 550 students served by 28 faculty members who represent 21 fields of engineering. ECU offers a BS in Engineering with six concentrations: Biomedical Engineering, Bioprocess Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Environmental, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. To learn more about the Department of Engineering, go to cet.ecu.edu/engineering/about-ecu-engineering/.
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