Hispanic STEM Transfer Student Challenges and Resources

Cohort: 2016
Fellow: Maura Borrego

In 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology documented the need to prepare an additional one million STEM professionals over the next ten years. To achieve this increase in STEM degree production, attention must be directed towards improving pathways for all students, specifically minority students who have been historically underserved. Research has indicated a need to focus on these underrepresented groups in STEM settings as enrollment patterns and access to higher education differs between groups of students. For the past few years, UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering has admitted 100-200 engineering transfer students, of which 15-25% are of Latino descent. This is a much smaller population than incoming freshmen, and less attention is given to programs and resources that support transfer student success specifically. This is at least in part due to the diversity of transfer students’ prior experiences. This project will follow on from a statewide study of Latino engineering transfer students. Specifically, this study found that students transferring to UT Austin did not feel prepared for the academic rigor of UT coursework and degree programs and that different subpopulations of transfer students experience different challenges. This project will delve more deeply into understanding exactly what aspects of academic rigor were most challenging for these different groups of transfer students, as well as what resources were most helpful in overcoming these challenges.