David Knight
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Education Research
Many talented low-income engineering students leave before finishing their degrees. They often depend on a tangle of scholarships, advising, tutoring and transfer offices.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
engineering education
low-income students
student retention
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Answer how partnerships within and between institutions can be designed, built and sustained to support low-income engineering students, using a multiple case study of S-STEM program leaders and their organizational partners.
- Fund and mentor 40 accelerator grant teams from the S-STEM scholarship community as they assess how well their own partnership designs, processes and structures work.
- Link new partnership data with existing student success and archival data sets to identify partnership processes that colleges may want to make permanent.
- Convene summer institutes where partner organizations share data and build action plans for each campus, and produce research-to-practice briefs for the S-STEM community.
More about the research
Those services are run by different units and sometimes by different colleges. This project treats student struggles as problems of how organizations work together rather than as problems with the students. It asks how partnerships within and between institutions can be designed, built and sustained to support low-income engineering students. The project focuses on both students starting college for the first time and students who transfer, including from community colleges.
Why it matters
Colleges have limited money to help low-income engineering students graduate. This work could show which kinds of partnerships between offices and between institutions, including community colleges and four-year schools, best support those students. That could help schools spend resources more wisely and help more first-time and transfer students earn engineering degrees.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Dustin Grote
Weber State University, UT·Education Research
Examine how intra- and inter-institutional partnerships are designed and sustained to support low-income engineering students, through a multiple case study of S-STEM program leaders and their organizational partners.
Jane Lehr
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Education Research
Test whether scholarship program activities grow transfer students' social networks, resilience, confidence and sense of belonging, using social network analysis, surveys and qualitative interviews.
Andrew Watkins
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Education Research
Develop a shared curriculum for the first two years of computer science across 15 Ohio colleges, and use it to create formal articulation agreements so community college credits transfer cleanly.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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