Agenda

With support from the National Science Foundation, the NAE and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) hosted a conference to explore ways to support institutions in recruiting, attracting, and graduating engineering students with a wider array of pre-college backgrounds and experiences. The conference covered the topics of recruiting, admissions, transfer pathways, historically marginalized groups, onboarding students, and student skills development.

Conference attendees worked together to develop a draft framework to organize best practices for various student audiences, taking into account intersectionalities across multiple student identities, that could be reconfigured by different institutions to fit their mission, existing programs, and student audiences.

These outputs, as well as those of a listening session hosted by the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) to engage students, will form the basis of post-conference virtual working group meetings that will include additional subject matter experts to address issues that surfaced during the conference. Iterative feedback from a variety of stakeholders will result in a guiding framework that will foster the development of collective research-based practices and execution strategies to address the most pressing challenges in engineering student success, onboarding, and first year experience programming specifically contextualized for engineering, institutional types, and marginalized and minoritized demographic groups. The outcomes of this project will be summarized and posted on the NAE and ASEE websites.