The bridge from community college to a STEM degree is real. For too many students, it doesn’t hold.
My introductory post as Guest Editor for the AAAS S-STEM REC Year 4 Blog is now live. The theme: Cultivating Supportive Scholar Pathways. My subtopic: Pathways for Transfer Students.
A few numbers worth sitting with:
🔹 Only 16% of community college students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2023).
🔹 STEM attrition peaks in the first two semesters after transfer, when peer networks are thinnest (Crisp et al., 2017).
🔹 What separates students who thrive from those who simply survive is not academic preparation. It is the presence or absence of structured support (Gray et al., 2022).
The research is clear: this is not a student capability problem. It is an institutional design problem. Structured peer mentoring, proactive advising, and deliberate on-ramps for STEM-aspiring students are not nice-to-haves. The evidence says they are the difference.
I am proud to be working with Michael Brown (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and Pauline Entin (UMass Dartmouth) on this subtopic. Their posts are coming. Mine is up now.
A sincere thank you to the AAAS Center for Science, Engineering, and the Workforce (CSEW) and the S-STEM REC team for this platform and the opportunity to contribute to it.
Read it here 👇
https://sstemrec.aaas.org/blog/transfer-students-in-stem-building-the-bridge/
