Evaluating the five pillars of a Summer Bridge Program and their influence on participants' intentions to complete an engineering degree.

In the United States, increasing enrollment and retention in engineering degrees remains an ongoing challenge in higher education.Moreover, current university educational efforts aim to increase the immediate enrollment of diverse students right after high school completion.Early educational programs like Summer Bridge aim to enhance academic preparation, goal achievement, and persistence in students before their first academic semester, ensuring academic success and persistence in engineering in the early stages of college life.Even though Summer Bridge Programs (SBP) are well known across higher institutions, our long-running summer bridge program contributes an important perspective to the discussion about the impact of summer bridge programs on underrepresented minority students (URM).At Mississippi State University, the SBP that has been implemented for more than 25 years provides targeted support to URM engineering students, and by far majority of the participants are URMs.However, a strategic partnership has recently been implemented that provides cooperation between the university and industry sponsors.Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the new SBP structure at MSU in enhancing college success for incoming engineering students.This paper provides an overview of the five pillars of the program (academics, bonding, engineering at MSU, engineering projects, and industry), their goals, expected outcomes, and ways to assess their contribution to the retention of URM students, with a special focus on Black engineering students as they represent the majority of participation in our program.By conducting pre-and post-student surveys with the 35 participants in the 2024 cohort, we investigated how participation in the summer bridge program affects academic readiness, self-efficacy levels, goal orientation, expectations, and sense of belonging among participants and ultimately their intentions to pursue or not pursue an engineering major.Subscales included self-efficacy (general, design, and experimental), the Achievement Goal Questionnaire (AGQ), and items from the Longitudinal Assessment of Engineering Self-Efficacy (LAESE) were applied.Participation in SBP showed statistically significant differences in items that measured selfefficacy, academic readiness, sense of belonging, and knowledge about university life and industry.However, goal orientation and career expectations did not exhibit changes.Results support that the current five-pillar structure effectively promotes student success and persistence in engineering degrees for first-year students at Mississippi State University.