A recently released study titled, “STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees,” notes that Black and Latinx students who participated in a rigorous STEM summer program prior to their senior year of high school were more likely to enroll at top-ranked colleges and universities, persist and graduate within four years with a STEM degree.
Released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the study indicates that the STEM pipeline is better strengthened by the earlier intervention rather than the conventional practice of providing supports to students already enrolled in colleges or universities.
Dr. Sarah Cohodes, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said she and her co-authors wanted to take this exploration from anecdotal evidence—individuals saying such programs made a difference in their lives—to something formal to support the idea. The objective is to show the programming made an impact rather than the assumption that these were highly motivated students who would have succeeded regardless.
Dr. Sarah Cohodes
“Information like this is what helps make policy decisions about what kind of programs to invest in and where it is important to support different initiatives,” said Cohodes.
The researchers found a host institution that ran summer programs and the data was collected from high-achieving, rising high school seniors enrolled over three summers starting in 2014. Each summer, 75–120 students were randomly assigned to one of three learning groups. One group participated in a six-week residential program; one group attended a one-week compressed residential program and one group took part in an online cohort. There was also a control group. Researchers then compared enrollment trends, persistence and graduation rates.
While 87% of the individuals in the control attended a four-year college immediately after high school, by the fourth year of college the number dropped to 75%. Of the control group students, 53.2% graduate from a four-year college in four years, which is higher than the national four-year graduation rate of 45.3%, but researchers found this low because these students have near-perfect GPAs. By contrast, those students from the control group who attended the institution that hosted the summer programs had a four-year graduation rate of 87%.
The STEM summer programs increased the four-year graduation rate. Both the six-week and one-week programs increase the likelihood that a student graduates from any institution within four years by about 8 percentage points.
