What the Hub is:

The objective of the S-STEM Organizational Partnerships Research Hub is to advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students. Partnerships across the education system are essential for improving STEM; achieving the systematic, structural, or sustainable change desired by the S-STEM program is seldom achieved by individual isolated units and often requires partnerships across silos within an academic institution (intra-institution partnerships) and across institutions (inter-institution partnerships). Facilitating “the establishment of infrastructure and collaborations” is also a primary goal across S-STEM program tracks. However, how such partnerships are built, designed, and sustained remains a great challenge facing the field. This Hub is working to organize groups to conduct research focused on supporting low-income undergraduate engineering, computer science, and computing students in ways that are “congruent with the institutional context and resources” while going “beyond the direct impact on S-STEM Scholars” to impact departments and institutions involved. We are zooming in on the institutional infrastructure and collaborative work between researchers, administrators and practitioners, and policymakers. Our goals include building research capacity and forming a community of practice among current and past S-STEM grant holders that focuses on these key organizational structure topics. Doing so will enable the proposed hub to generate new knowledge about how to systematically support low-income engineering, computer science, and computing students in sustainable ways.

Hub History:

The NSF S-STEM Hub, established in January 2022, emerged from a collaborative effort between Virginia Tech, Weber State University, University of Cincinnati, and Northern Virginia Community College. Drawing on their extensive experience with S-STEM programs, these institutions joined forces to create a dynamic support network to investigate partnerships in S-STEM programs.

In its inaugural year, the Hub launched an accelerator grant program, engaging 10 teams in personalized projects aimed at developing, enhancing, or sustaining partnerships within their S-STEM programs. These projects spanned a wide range of collaborations, including inter-institutional partnerships with regional high schools, community colleges, universities, and industry, as well as intra-institutional partnerships across faculty, departments, and colleges.

Building on this momentum, the Hub’s second year saw the recruitment of 10 new teams and continued support for six teams from the first cohort. The Hub also spearheaded a collective project focused on curricular complexity. Through workshops and individualized assistance, participating teams learned to quantify and visualize curricular complexity in their programs, using these insights as a catalyst for partnership-driven change.

Looking ahead, the Hub plans to recruit teams for its third year, centering efforts on a common project that will further advance S-STEM goals and foster innovation in supporting low-income STEM students.