To help two-year colleges prepare competitive proposals to the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM) program the Community College S-STEM Network (CCSN) is offering a virtual, multi-week workshop beginning in October.

David R. Brown, principal investigator of NSF Award 2224671, co-facilitates the S-STEM Proposal Preparation Workshop.

Thanks to a current Dear Colleague Letter to the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) community, ATE grantees may also apply for S-STEM funding for up to $1 less than 20 percent of their original ATE grant awards and one of the usual S-STEM funding tracks.

The ATE supplemental awards, however, are for scholarships only. They do not include funding for student services, faculty, staff, or institutional indirect costs of typical S-STEM awards, which begin at $1 million for six years and provide at least $600,000 for scholarships.

S-STEMs are last dollar scholarships that cover up to $15,000 annually of low-income, academically talented STEM majors’ unmet financial needs. Institutions submitting S-STEM proposals determine their costs of attendance, but these expenses can include not only tuition, fees, and books, but living expenses such as housing, transportation, and child care.

“This can be really transformative to people in community college communities,” said David R. Brown, one of the principal investigators of the project entitled Developing and Sharing Research on Low-Income Community College Student Decision-Making and Pathways in STEM.

The other principal investigator is Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers. The project is supported by a pair of collaborative grants, National Science Foundation (NSF) Award 2224671 to the Foundation for California Community Colleges and NSF Award 2224623 to Rutgers University.

Brown and Van Noy are leading the Community College S-STEM Network (CCSN) with a team of researchers who are focusing on how S-STEM students make decisions and what helps them persist to embark on STEM careers.

One of CCSN’s initiatives also assists community college faculty and staff members in navigating the S-STEM proposal process.

CCSN is currently taking applications for its free S-STEM Proposal Preparation Workshop. Selected individuals will meet online weekly for an hour beginning at 3:30 p.m. (Eastern) on Fridays from October 11 to February 28, to help them submit S-STEM grant proposals in advance of the program’s deadline on March 4, 2025.

ATE PIs Encouraged to Apply for Workshop

Michelle Van Noy, principal investigator of NSF Award 2224623, is director of EERC at Rutgers University.

During an interview, Brown encouraged ATE grantees to apply for the workshop because there is “a lot of overlap” between the two S-STEM options. He pointed out that the information required for ATE supplemental funding for S-STEM “is really the meat of an S-STEM proposal.”

That is why, he said, “We hope some folks might do both.”

He recommends that STEM faculty members interested in applying for the workshop read the S-STEM program solicitation and the Dear Colleague letter carefully.

Both require that prospective scholarship recipients:

• Be United States (U.S.) citizens, U.S. nationals, or aliens admitted as refugees;
• Be enrolled at least half-time in an associate degree program in a S-STEM eligible discipline;
• Demonstrate academic ability or potential as defined by the institution;
• Be low-income; and,
• Have demonstrated unmet financial need.

“You really have to, at a very small grain size, define your pool of potential S-STEM applicants. Who are folks out there that do have unmet financial need, and that do qualify across the board to be an S-STEM Scholar?”

The Dear Colleague letter states that the supplemental funding request must include the following:

John Krupczak, professor of engineering at Hope College, co-facilitates the S-STEM Proposal Preparation Workshop.

• A detailed summary of proposed work that describes the planned scholarship program including institutional context;  
• A description of the pool of potential scholars;  
• Institution-wide retention and graduation rates;
• Current, one-year retention rates and graduation rates for the pool of potential scholarship recipients in each S-STEM eligible discipline that is included in the request;
• Determination of scholarship amounts based on the cost of attendance (COA);
• Calculation of unmet need based on COA and Student Aid Index (SAI), which is determined by financial details students provide on FAFSA minus other grants and scholarships they receive;
• Determination of financial eligibility that considers the institution’s definition of low-income;
• Description of academic eligibility that describes clear and equitable selection criteria for scholarships and how scholars will be selected out of the pool of all qualified individuals;
• Student support services that will respond to the documented low-income student and institutional needs or goals; and  
• A letter from the financial aid office stating it is prepared to meet S-STEM program requirements.

As an emeritus professor of chemistry from Southwestern College and principal investigator of 16 NSF grants and sub-awards, Brown is familiar with the challenges some community college faculty and staff members face gathering data and identifying students who meet all of the program’s criteria.

How to gather and parse the data and develop a plan for managing the various aspects of the project are the key topics covered during the 12-meeting workshop facilitated by Brown and John Krupczak, a professor of engineering at Hope College. Brown and Krupczak were NSF program directors who each  served three years as rotators in the Division of Undergraduate Education. Krupczak’s assignments included co-leading the S-STEM program.

CCSN’s website states that “By the end of this program, you will be able to complete all components of a competitive NSF S-STEM proposal.”

Despite the complexity of the S-STEM application Brown thinks every community college should pursue S-STEM funding, he said: “Who among us doesn't have STEM majors who are academically talented and come from low-income backgrounds?”