Educational programs in general are vital to the success of the economy. Even more so are technical education programs that equip students with the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills needed to address the growing workforce challenge. However, since the Great Recession, "Trends in total institutional revenues for community colleges indicate significant shifts toward external revenue sources and away from core state and local funding for basic operations" (Merisotis & Wolanin, n.d.). In response to this, "colleges and university systems across the states have eliminated administrative and faculty positions (in some instances replacing them with non-tenure-track staff), cut courses or increased class sizes, and in some cases, consolidated or eliminated whole programs, departments, or schools" (Mitchell & Leachman, 2015). Amid budget cuts, grants have become even more important as funding sources for new, innovative programs at public two-year colleges. The National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF-ATE) program is a highly competitive program with a unique focus on two-year colleges and technician education. However, relatively few community college and technical college educators have experience seeking competitive grants or are aware of the NSF-ATE funding opportunity.
As a leadership development and outreach project for NSF-ATE, the one-of-a kind Mentor-Connect project offers an efficient way for prospective principal investigators to learn effective proposal preparation strategies for this program and to receive cost-free assistance that helps them gain the competitive edge. It also addresses NSF's diversity goals.
Background NSF developed the ATE program in response to the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act of 1992. This Congressional mandate directed the federal science agency to utilize associatedegree-granting colleges to improve the quality of technicians for advanced technology fields that are important to the nation's security and competitiveness (National Science Foundation, 2016). The program requires that two-year college educators have leadership roles in funded projects and that educators partner with employers.
Current grants support the development of technicians and the educators who teach them in advanced manufacturing, agriculture and biotechnologies, energy and environmental technologies, engineering technologies, information technologies, micro and nanotechnologies, and security technologies. The program also supports STEM learning in general, evaluation of NSF-ATE initiatives, and technician-related educational research (ATE Central, n.d.). In 2015, NSF-ATE initiatives, which are pilot tests of a wide array of curricula and pedagogical innovations, educated 112,010 students, developed 2,530 curriculum materials, and offered 2,120 professional development opportunities (Wilson, Wingate, Lee, & Gullickson, 2016).
The unique project is designed to 1) fill the void created by NSF's elimination of the preliminary proposal review process for the ATE program in 2012; 2) address the challenge that approximately two-thirds of the nation's 1,123 community colleges have never received NSF funding; 3) better manage the rapidly growing number of requests received by ATE center principal investigators and NSF program officers related to grant proposal development and project management ; and 4) most importantly, develop grant writing and leadership skills among STEM faculty members at two-year colleges.
The Mentor-Connect project resulted from a comprehensive planning process that involved NSF-ATE principal investigators, NSF-ATE program officers, potential NSF-ATE grantees, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Association of Community Colleges, and IBM Corporation. It is modeled on IBM's award-winning Global Mentoring Program (Murrell, Forte-Trammell, & Bing, 2008).
In its translation of the IBM mentoring model, the project aims to recruit talented STEM faculty from institutions previously not funded by NSF-ATE, involve diverse individuals and institutions in the NSF-ATE community, expand access to the knowledge and expertise of experienced NSF-ATE principal investigators, and support knowledge transfer and retention of the NSF-ATE program's institutional wisdom from experienced ATE principal investigators to new generations of principal investigators.
The project's three-pronged approach involves mentoring, technical assistance, and digital resources. At its core the project involves one-on-one mentoring of selected faculty by experienced NSF-ATE principal investigators. The project also purposefully leverages the talents of individuals from within the NSF-ATE community and mentors who are some of the program's most experienced and successful principal investigators. Its technical assistance comes primarily through the grant-writing training that Mentor-Connect personnel provide during in-person workshops, webinars, and in their responses to help-desk queries. Its digital resources include a key-word searchable digital library collection of information specific to preparing and submitting NSF-ATE proposals. The combination of just-in-time instruction and on-going assistance provided by the project team is designed to build capacity among community colleges to prepare and submit competitive NSF-ATE proposals. Longer term, the project intends to be a regenerative mentoring system to develop STEM faculty leaders among those who become principal investigators and co-principal investigators. The project specifically targets colleges that are new to ATE, but the help desk and digital resources are available to all aspiring NSF-ATE grantees.
In their role as advisors, mentors are expected to provide feedback on grant proposal topics and proposal components, help the proposal writing team refine ideas and strategies, and provide referrals to ATE resources.
Mentees are expected to initiate and maintain regular contact with the mentor, ensure regular communication with college team members, and coordinate activities among campus stakeholders to meet proposal submission requirements and timelines.
The unique project also provides advice to mentors and selected mentees (project teams that the Mentor-Connect project serves), in the form of guidelines (See Appendix A -B). Mentors' advice guidelines include, but are not limited to the following: "Reinforce role boundariesbeware of taking on the mentees' institutional problems. [Help mentees] figure out how to best address and resolve issues that arise that affect their project and proposal, rather than fixing it yourself." The 10 points of advice for mentors close with the following: "Content-remember the overriding project and NSF-ATE project goal is to help colleges develop or strengthen technician training programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields by developing a project that merits NSF funding. Good proposals tell a consistent story complemented by clear, specific, and achievable goals, objectives, timelines, and assigned responsibilities."
In addition to their mentors' attentive guidance, mentees receive technical assistance throughout their 10-month experience. Mentees receive technical assistance in the form of in-person group, one-on-one guidance, and instructional sections at the winter and summer workshops as well as through webinars. Mentee teams receive travel support to attend winter and summer workshops. The winter workshop is held at in a location less likely to be impacted by winter weather and the location has varied from year to year depending on the results of a competitive bid process. The summer workshop is held in conjunction with the High Impact Technology Exchange Conference (HI-TEC). HI-TEC is a national conference held each summer that is produced by the NSF-ATE centers. With a focus on advanced technological education, HI-TEC is a conference where secondary and postsecondary educators, counselors, industry professionals, trade organizations, and technicians can update their knowledge and skills. Charged with Educating America's Technical Workforce, the event focuses on the preparation needed by the existing and future workforce for companies in the high-tech sectors that drive our nation's economy (High Impact Technology Exchange Conference, n.d.). The location of HI-TEC also varies from year to year within the US.
At both workshops, project staff, co-principal investigators, and other individuals with relevant expertise present information about the intricacies of the NSF-ATE grant application process. Workshop sessions cover the various components of a proposal as well as the mechanics necessary to preparation, such as formulating indirect costs and developing industry collaborations. Mentees not only hear about NSF-ATE review panels, but they also gain firsthand experience with the review process during a mock panel review session where both funded and declined NSF-ATE grant proposals are reviewed.
Project staff members provide ongoing technical support to mentees via a help desk, which accepts both calls and emails. In addition, the project runs a YouTube channel that serves as a repository for the archived and recorded technical assistance webinars it has created. Technical assistance webinars provide pertinent information, tips, templates, and examples to help assist potential grantees in preparing a budget, forms, and evaluation sections within their NSF-ATE proposal.
The webinars and other digital resources developed to inform mentees are available to all prospective NSF-ATE grantees at no cost. The keyword searchable, online library collection includes proposal samples, guides, tutorials, checklists, excerpts from NSF publications, other publications, and an extensive list of frequently-asked-questions with answers. As open resources on the project website, these materials are available to faculty and staff at any U.S. organization interested in preparing competitive NSF-ATE grant proposals.
During four consecutive years beginning in 2012, the project has accepted applications (due in October) from which it selects 20 colleges to receive mentoring and travel support for mentees to attend training during the first 10 months of the following year. To be eligible for the program, a college must have not received an ATE grant in the past 10 years or have never received one at all. To diversify the NSF-ATE applicant pool, the project team encourages applications from small colleges, rural colleges, and colleges that serve populations underrepresented in STEM fields. The team leaders target these three types of institutions because they have historically lacked the institutional capacity or personnel with the experience to encourage faculty to seek ATE-NSF funding; however, the Mentor-Connect project welcomes all eligible institutions to apply. The NSF-ATE program "encourages proposals from Minority Serving Institutions and other institutions that support the recruitment, retention, and completion of underrepresented students in technician education programs" (National Science Foundation, n.d.). Thus, to support NSF diversity goals, the diversity of the faculty team named in a college's application is also considered during the Mentor-Connect cohort selection process. NSF considers underrepresented minorities in STEM as American Indians, Alaska Natives, Blacks/African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders.
NSF's process for reviewing ATE grant applications and making awards means that it is common for six to nine months to elapse from the day a proposal is submitted until notification of a funding decision is received. The project guides prospective grantees (selected mentees) in understanding NSF's funding process and helps them through the proposal preparation process by providing technical assistance through workshops, webinars, and constant communication with project principal investigators and mentors. An illustration of this process is displayed below (Proposal and Award Policies, 2017). The project's application is simple. The first step is a self-scored test of applicants' knowledge of the NSF-ATE solicitation (See Appendix C for Self-Assessment Test). The solicitation is a public document that explains the funding opportunity, proposal requirements, and submission process (National Science Foundation, 2016). The project team refers to this as a self-assessment because it expects college personnel who wish to be involved to evaluate whether they are ready to begin the process of developing an NSF-ATE proposal. The questions on the self-assessment are designed to stimulate careful study of the NSF-ATE grant solicitation. The application requires a 300-word statement from the college about the industry cluster or technical field that the two-person college team intends to target with the project it plans to propose to NSF-ATE. In addition, each faculty team member must submit a 200-word personal statement about his or her interest in participating in the mentoring experience. The final item in the application is an affidavit from a college administrator confirming the college's eligibility and intent to apply for an NSF-ATE Small Grant for Institutions New to the ATE Program track.
Applications are evaluated by the principal investigator and co-principal investigators according to a rubric that helps assess the likelihood that the college team can benefit from and be successful in this endeavor (See Appendix D for rubric). The rubric ratings consider whether a college is rural or minority-serving and if it has received other ATE-funded mentoring. Faculty attributes covered by the rubric include gender, race, ethnicity, years of academic experience, discipline, and teaching status (e.g., permanent/full-time or adjunct/part-time). Applicants are notified whether or not they have been selected for the current Mentor-Connect cohort in early November. For the five cohorts selected to date, the overall college acceptance rate for a cohort is 65%. The acceptance rate has varied from cohort to cohort depending on the number of applicants each year. The table below (Table 1) shows the acceptance rates for applicants for each of the five cohorts. The first in-person activity for each cohort of STEM faculty teams from each selected college is the winter workshop that is held early in the year. This first convening of the cohort enables teams to meet and work with their mentor and learn about grant writing for the NSF ATE Program. The project provides travel support for two STEM faculty participants. The project participant selection process ensures that either of the individuals has qualifications to serve as the principal investigator of the ATE project that will be developed.
As a result of promising results among early cohort participants whose teams also included a college grant writer and/or an administrator, the project now encourages colleges to pay for additional personnel to attend the two-day winter workshop. Having a grant writer or administrator involved with the mentees from the outset seems to increase college buy-in and the likelihood the team will submit an NSF-ATE proposal. In a few instances, the larger teams have made it possible for proposal preparation to continue despite personnel turnover during the year.
To increase awareness of the project and NSF-ATE, project leaders participated in ten outreach events from 2013 to 2016. To encourage participation in NSF-ATE by specific audiences, project personnel participated in specially targeted programs for audiences made up primarily of faculty teaching underserved populations, diverse faculty (i.e. women and race and ethnic groups underrepresented in STEM), and grant writers.
In selecting mentors to work with potential grantees, the team uses a referral and recommendation process that taps into a pool of educators with many years of experience working in the NSF-ATE program. Among the mentors are principal investigators and directors of ATE national and regional centers, NSF-ATE project principal investigators, NSF proposal review panelists, and former NSF program officers. Potential mentors first complete interest profiles. If they seem to be a good match for mentees, they are asked to fill out a formal application unless they have previously served as a project mentor. Nineteen mentors have served to date. Six mentors have served as mentors for one year of the project, two mentors have served for two years, five have served for three years, two mentors have served for four years, and four mentors have served all five years since the project started.
Selected mentors agree to participate in all scheduled mentoring events and to provide 36 hours of one-on-one work with each of the two mentee teams assigned to them. This specified time span ensures that each team receives enough mentoring time to make a difference. It also protects mentors from teams that may be inclined to be too demanding. The mentor-mentee matches are not necessarily based on STEM field or geographic proximity. However, those are among the factors that the project's principal investigator and co-principal investigators consider when they assign mentees to mentors.
Mentors initially convene for a dinner meeting the evening prior to the start of the annual NSF-ATE Principal Investigators Conference, a fall conference organized by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), in which "key people working on ATE projects across the country" get together and focus on "critical issues related to advanced technological education" (AACC, 2016). This initial meeting with the project team and NSF program officers is followed by a mentor online orientation in mid-November. There is also a mentor meeting at the winter workshop. Guidelines and further clarification about expectations are provided, which are stated in more detail in the methods section. The guidelines list general expectations for mentors and mentees and offer tips for successful mentoring relationships.
Applications have been strong in each of the five years of the program. Overall 65% of the 156 institutions that applied to the project have been selected for the mentoring experience. The 101 cohort teams have come from 31 different states. In the first year of the project, two colleges had two teams selected. Consequently, a total of 99 institutions have been involved in the first five cohorts. All of these institutions are in geographic areas where faculty or other college personnel were not previously engaged with the NSF-ATE program. The project references AACC classifications to identify whether a college is rural or serves an underserved or underrepresented student population. Colleges are not selected based on geographic location alone.
The map below shows the 31 states represented by the five cohorts of mentee teams selected from 2012 through 2016. Colleges from 12 states were in Cohort 1; colleges from 13 states (8 new) were in Cohort 2; colleges from 16 states (4 new) were in Cohort 3; colleges from 15 states (3 new) were in Cohort 4; and colleges from 18 states (4 new) were in Cohort 5, the current cohort. While the NSF-ATE program had awarded grants to institutions in every U.S. state and Puerto Rico before funding of this special project, analysis showed the distribution of those awards to be lopsided: a small group of institutions had received multiple awards whereas a far greater number of community and technical colleges had received none. So while all 50 states have had NSF-ATE grants since 1993, there were regions within most states where either colleges had never sought NSF-ATE grants or their grant proposals had not been successful. For example, in the state of Washington, NSF-ATE grant recipients had historically been concentrated in the metropolitan areas along the state's western coast. The project team specifically targeted colleges in the underserved eastern side of the state of Washington. Four teams from this area were in Cohort 1. The project evaluator has documented similar geographic diversity in other states and attributed the change to the project.
The STEM faculty leadership component of the initiative seeks to impact the diversity of the principal investigator pool. As part of this effort the project team is engaged in a longitudinal study of the geographic and demographic diversity of the colleges and individuals who participate over time. So far achieving gender balance and ethnic diversity has been constrained because STEM educators outside the biological sciences currently and historically employed at two-year institutions or colleges have been predominantly male and Caucasian.
To increase the participation of faculty members from underrepresented groups in STEM, the project team has initiated work with minority affiliate councils within AACC, such as the National Community College Hispanic Council (NCCHC), to encourage applications from minority-serving institutions and from minority faculty members.
The project team faces a similar challenge in its search for mentors from underrepresented groups. The most experienced principal investigators involved in the NSF-ATE program are predominantly Caucasian. To address this challenge, project leaders are initiating strategies to recruit and prepare mentors from among the more diverse pool of experienced ATE project coprincipal investigators or other project personnel.
Nearly all the colleges-86% of the 81 colleges participating in the first four cohorts-submitted proposals to the NSF-ATE program. Submitting a competitive proposal to NSF-ATE is an important objective and the primary goal of teams working through the mentorship process.
Of the 54 colleges in the first three cohorts whose applications have been completely processed by NSF, 36 have been awarded grants of approximately $200,000 each. This 67% success rate far exceeds ATE's usual funding rate of 22%. However, it should be noted that mentorship project participants' success rate is heavily influenced by their submission to the Small Grants for Colleges New to ATE program.
The time lag for documenting project participant success is significant. Because mentee colleges submit proposals in October of the year in which they are a part of the mentorship, Cohort 4 colleges that submitted in October 2016 will not receive funding decisions from NSF until mid-2017. Cohort 5 colleges will not submit until October 2017 (See Appendix E for more detailed information on the NSF-ATE Proposal and Award Process for funding).
The monetary outcomes for the project are most accurately considered in the context of the funding for the Small Grants for Institutions New to ATE. As the NSF-ATE Solicitation (NSF 14-577) explains, within this track the agency awards "approximately 12 to 20 awards for up to $200,000 (each)" every year (National Science Foundation, 2016). To help address the agency's diversity goals, the project selects participants for its project from institutions that are eligible for the small grants track. Leaders and mentors encourage participants to select this funding track. However, not all participants have followed this advice and as shown in the next chart. Participants submitting first-time proposals in the more competitive ATE Program funding tracks have not fared well. Those seeking higher levels of funding in the other ATE funding tracks face far greater competition.
In January 2017, participant funding results were available for Cohorts 1, 2, and 3, which were the cohort colleges submitting proposals in October 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively. These data show that those submitting proposals to the NSF-ATE Program for the first time are significantly more likely to be successful in winning one of the estimated 12 to 20 awards made in the small grants funding track each year. It is important to note that the Small Grants for Colleges New to ATE proposals are reviewed separately and compete only with other small grant proposals. Historically, the funding rate in this track is 60 to 70%. However, the overall ATE rate is 22%.
Nevertheless, the data provide evidence that training and support provided by the Mentor-Connect project are affecting in positive ways both college capacity and faculty member skills to submit competitive proposals in the small grants track. Other funding tracks within ATE are more competitive, and the program's overall funding rate of 22% is lower than for the small grants track that has historically ranged from 60 to 70%. For all tracks, the number of awards made by NSF-ATE each year and funding rates are influenced by the overall budget for the program, the number of proposals submitted for consideration, and the quality of proposals.
The feedback mentees have provided on project evaluations has been quite positive. The following quotations from 2015 mentees' evaluations are typical of mentees' comments from all the cohorts: "Invaluable experience! Great working with our mentor. She was a wealth of knowledge and put us in touch with many resources to further our project."
"I love you all. I love this mentorship program. You have been sooooo helpful!"
"[The project] has been extremely valuable throughout the process. We really appreciate all that you've done."
have offered suggestions for improvements, but the majority of mentees have given the project high ratings. For example, 90% of the 32 mentees who completed surveys after the January 2015 workshop rated the pre-workshop homework as a 4 (Great Value) or 3. None of the mentees rated any workshop component as a 1 (Little Value). All ratings were based on a 1 to 5 scale. One mentee statement summarizes the project's potential to instigate improvements in STEM programs and transform faculty into STEM leaders: "If it weren't for this event [workshop], I would have zero chance of receiving a grant. I now understand what to do and expect. I feel a lot more confident to move forward."
Through the effective use of experienced ATE principal investigators as mentors, projectprovided technical assistance and training, and strategic development of ATE-specific grantwriting digital resources, this unique project has expanded the number of community colleges engaging with the NSF-ATE program. The project has expanded awareness of NSF-ATE among previously non-participating technical and community colleges and increased the geographic diversity of the institutions submitting proposals to the NSF-ATE program. The project has facilitated knowledge transfer from mentors to prospective NSF-ATE principal investigators, improved the quality of proposals being submitted in the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE program, and is cultivating leadership skills among mentees.
A significant contributor to the high funding success rate of cohort colleges is based on the Mentor-Connect faculty development process. It involves a rigorous process for intake and selection of participants, guidance for mentors, the systematic implementation of a mentoring protocol, creation of online reference materials, participant instruction, and technical support to mentors, mentees, and all cohort participants. Analysis of impact is an on-going process. A longitudinal study that will be completed in 2020 will provide information about the project's impact on the NSF-ATE program and technician education in general.
The long-term expectation is that the stronger, funded proposals that result from the project will improve STEM technician programs and develop more highly qualified technicians to meet the nation's workforce needs. In addition, replicable models for promoting success of community colleges in the competitive arena of National Science Foundation grant funding and developing future STEM faculty leaders are emerging and may be applied to other NSF funding programs.