Too few two-year technical and community colleges pursue funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Instead, they tend to rely on the U.S. Department of Education or the U.S. Department of Labor for federal grants. From the way grant funding opportunities are announced, to the processes used in reviewing proposals and making funding decisions, to the policies and procedures that govern submission of proposals and implementation of grants, NSF operates differently from other federal funding agencies that make grant awards. The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program is unique within NSF because of its focus on two-year colleges and workforce development, specifically for those who complete for-credit programs of study and earn credentials that enable program completers to enter the skilled technical workforce. NSF expects faculty to be involved in developing proposals and implementing projects funded by the agency. Meeting this expectation requires a paradigm shift for many community and technical colleges where the primary emphasis is on teaching and where there is seldom any expectation that faculty will contribute to college efforts to secure external funding from federal sources. In addition, in 2021, the overall NSF funding rate was 26% which presents daunting odds for success. However, 10 years of research demonstrate the effectiveness of an intervention that dramatically increases the funding rate for two-year colleges seeking funding from the NSF ATE Program. Since 2012, the Mentor-Connect initiative has been funded by the NSF ATE Program to help two-year college technician educators and related STEM faculty develop the grant-writing skills needed to meet NSF expectations and benefit from ATE funding. Over the past decade, 80% of Mentor-Connect participants have successfully submitted proposals. To date, the average funding rate for these proposals is 71%.
This paper describes how the Mentor-Connect intervention works and for whom, what outcomes have resulted for participants who become grantees, and how two-year colleges and technician educators can benefit.
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This content will become publicly available on June 25, 2024
WIP: NSF-funded Activity in Support of the LGBTQ+ Community: Award Search Strategy and Selection Criteria
In this Work in Progress (WIP) paper, we detail the initial steps taken to study NSF grants that seek to benefit the LGBTQ+ community through understanding their experiences or by working toward their full participation in society. To this end, we have identified active and expired NSF grants that either advance knowledge of LGBTQ+ experiences or offer some benefit to the community (e.g., tailored professional development, addressing and changing the marginalizing culture of STEM, etc.). We then developed a coding scheme to categorize these grants with respect to the level of positive impact they have on the LGBTQ+ community using modified Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria that parallels the NSF’s own criteria for evaluating proposals. The work established in this paper to identify and code LGBTQ-focused NSF grants will next allow us to extract trends in these grants over a period of over 4 decades.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1748499
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10480093
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["LGBTQ+","Federal Funding"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Other: pdf
- Location:
- https://peer.asee.org/44136.
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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