TAMPA, FL (Dr. Brittany Sears reporting) – There is an ever increasing leaky pipeline affecting STEM education in the United States. According to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA about one in three high school graduates who attend college will intend to major in a STEM course of study. Less than 50% of them will actually complete their degree. While most of these students go on to major in something else and graduate the melt in STEM college majors has created a drought of qualified STEM employees. A staggering 3.6 million STEM jobs are currently unfilled because of a lack of qualified applicants. And STEM employees are not only sought after at a high rate but they also earn more than their peers, earning a staggering $14,000 more than other Bachelors graduates. In addition the number of women and minorities still lags behind in most STEM focused career fields creating a representation gap that must be addressed. The Florida Consortium of Metropolitan Research Universities has decided enough is enough.
On February 12, 55 faculty from the three Consortium institutions and five STEM disciplines convened for the first Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) Summit as part of a planning grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust. The Trust, whose mission is to make a meaningful impact in education and other human services, awarded the Consortium a planning grant to improve STEM student retention and graduation; furthermore, because Consortium institutions serve 47% of the State University System’s total enrollment and 54% of the state’s undergraduate minority enrollment, the Consortium is uniquely situated to investigate methods to improve recruitment, retention, and graduation of underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines.
Prior to the Summit, faculty had met in discipline-specific FLCs at their respective institutions. Their ideas for STEM education improvement developed momentum as they identified problem statements. Armed with intervention proposals targeted to their respective universities and students, at the Summit, the FLCs met with their counterparts from other universities as well as with colleagues from other disciplines at their own institutions. These interactions allowed faculty to identify common (and disparate) issues and discuss the extent to which existing solutions addressed these issues and which required novel interventions.
Faculty reported numerous valuable elements to the organization of the Summit into discipline and institution-specific breakout groups, citing the “cross-pollination of ideas,” “valuable discussions with faculty in the same disciplines across institutions,” and “different solutions that have already been created and implemented” as important steps in identifying how Consortium members can leverage their commonalities while tailoring STEM education interventions to the needs of their respective students.
When the disciplines reported back at the end of the day, their interests had clearly coalesced around common themes, such as living-learning communities and flipped pedagogies. Now, each discipline has been tasked with extending these ideas into informal proposals so that the Consortium may develop an implementation grant proposal around these interventions.
The University of Central Florida will host the next Summit, with the FLCs meeting in Orlando on April 15, 2016, to reexamine their proposals and discuss the implementation of these interventions at their respective universities. With the energy from last week’s Summit, we can’t wait to see the innovations our faculty develop for Florida students.