WIP: Engineering Persistence: A Support System for Students in Financial Need to Succeed

Engineering graduates have significant opportuni-ties for meaningful careers and social mobility, yet there needs to be more support for financially disadvantaged, academically gifted students. To improve these circumstances, we have intro-duced the Engineering Persistence project, an NSF -funded S-STEM scholarship program, at Rowan University. This project provides a group of students, selected by financial need and academic talent, with scholarships up to 10,000 USD per year, depending on financial need. In addition to these scholarships, we integrated a support system that includes interventions to support first- year engineering students' social and professional growth in their degree plans. We include in this paper the data collection and analysis process for the first year of this project, including the administration of the pre-survey, and the exploratory factor analysis conducted on the resulting data. This work in progress research paper aims to validate an instrument to assess the impact of an integrated support system on students' persistence in Rowan's engineering students.