For Immediate Release
September 26, 2011

Cañada College Receives $6 Million Grant from the U.S. Department of Education to Rebuild the Engineering Transfer Pipeline From Community Colleges to the UC and CSU Systems

The number of community college transfer students graduating from UC and CSU schools in engineering has dropped substantially over the last 10 years.

Cañada College has received a $6 million grant that will help rebuild the pipeline of engineering students from California’s community colleges to the UC and CSU systems while simultaneously increasing the number of minority students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The principal investigator for the grant, Amelito Enriquez, Professor of Engineering and Mathematics at Cañada College, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on community college engineering education. He co-authored a paper, “The Dismantling of the Engineering Education Pipeline” that details the decline of community college engineering programs brought about by decreasing enrollment due to increasing divergence in lower-division course requirements and recent budget cuts to education. It received a Best Paper Award at the 2011 American Society of Engineering Education National Conference in June.

The grant will fund the California Alliance for the Long-term Strengthening of Transfer Engineering Programs (CALSTEP). It will build on strategies that have been developed through previous federally funded grants awarded to Cañada and have proven to be effective. Those strategies include a summer workshop that trains community college engineering faculty to use distance-education technologies to increase student enrollment and improve student success. It also builds on a Joint Engineering Program that promotes collaboration among community college engineering programs to maximize their ability to serve students.

The project will solicit involvement from community colleges all over the state while encouraging collaboration to align curriculum, share pedagogies and resources, and develop collaborative programs. It will develop a Model Transfer Curriculum that will simplify articulation of courses between community colleges and four-year institutions and streamline the transfer process for thousands of community college students in pursuit of careers in engineering.

“In developing this curriculum, we will work directly with faculty from community colleges and four-year institutions,” Enriquez said.

Enriquez said the grant will also help colleges recruit and prepare underrepresented students to study in the STEM fields. “We have developed proven strategies to prepare students academically,” Enriquez said.

Dr. Jose Macedo, Professor and Chair, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department at Cal Poly, and Chair of the American Society of Engineering Education Pacific Southwest Section, said the CALSTEP project will strengthen the critically important pipeline in the engineering education system. “We recognize the increasingly important role that community colleges need to fulfill in order to produce engineers that are needed to address future needs and challenges,” he said.

Jo-Ann Panzardi, chair and instructor of the Engineering Department at Cabrillo College and Chair of the Community College Section of the California Engineering Liaison Council, said the CALSTEP project has great potential. “This project can improve community college engineering education thereby increasing the number of academically prepared community college students transferring to four-year institutions,” she said. “The project will help increase enrollments in engineering programs, and help them cope better with the recent budget crisis that threatens cancellations of courses and even entire programs.”

In 2002, approximately 48 percent of the engineering graduates from California’s university systems (UC and CSU) began at community colleges and then transferred. By 2008, that figure had dropped to 33 percent.

The diversification of transfer requirements among university engineering programs has led to this decline. It has increased the number of courses that community colleges must offer in order to maintain transfer options to different engineering majors at different UC and CSU universities. The diversification includes variability of requirements for students in the same major transferring to different institutions, as well as for students in different majors transferring to the same university, and has resulted in declining enrollments in community college engineering programs.

“By working with our partners at four year universities to establish Model Transfer Curriculum, we can begin to rebuild this pipeline,” Enriquez said. “To fill that pipeline, we need to recruit and academically prepare students for the rigors of an engineering education.”

Cañada College Interim President James Keller said the work Enriquez is doing to rebuild the engineering pipeline in California is receiving national attention. “The critical importance of this work cannot be overstated,” he said. “We’re talking about preparing tomorrow’s workforce to compete in the global marketplace.”

For more information, contact Robert Hood, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, at hoodr@smccd.edu or 306-3340