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The Florida IT Graduation Attainment Pathways (Flit-GAP), an NSF S-STEM, Track 3 grant effort, involves three public metropolitan institutions from Florida’s three most populous areas: Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, and University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. Flit-GAP supports up to 50 students per year for each of the first 3 years of the project’; recruits are juniors from Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, and Cybersecurity, and other computing majors. The relationship among the three institutions is formalized as the Consortium of Florida Metropolitan Research Universities. The consortium is a strategic priority of each institution. In Year 1, 42 students participated in the scholarship program at the three institutions (16 FIU; 14 UCF; 11 USF). 

Within research on broadening participation in computing, the experience and perspectives of undergraduate students have been important elements of exploration. As undergraduate students are experts in their own experiences, conducting research that focuses on understanding their perspective can help those who organize programmatic efforts to respond to student needs and concerns. This paper emerges from the context of a specific National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program. As with all S-STEM programs, Florida Information Technology Graduation Attainment Pathways (Flit-GAP) focuses on lower-income students, and thus this research surveying the program participants can help draw conclusions and pragmatic considerations about how to broaden participation for students historically marginalized by their socioeconomic status. 

There has been a decline in the graduation rate of women in computing since 1984 [2]. Calls to broaden the participation of women have corresponded to funding initiatives, such as the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program [3]. As the scholarly community takes up these calls and justifies their work, they tell stories about the problem, the solution, and most importantly, the people involved with broadening participation. Here we review some of those stories as represented by major trends in scholarly literature. 

Prior scholarship on broadening participation in undergraduate computing education has made important contributions to supporting underrepresented students’ identity development and persistence. However, the specific experiences of low-income students are underexplored, and the critical juncture between undergraduate education and career or graduate school pathways are as well. For scholarship support programs to make a further impact on broadening participation in computing, it is critical to know low-income students’ viewpoints on the barriers, risks, and opportunities associated with different career pathways that influence their post-graduation plans. Our research seeks to better understand the future career pathway perceptions of low-income undergraduate computing students. We explore students’ perceptions of three specific pathways: pursuing a graduate degree, working for a large company, and becoming an entrepreneur. This study utilizes Bourdieu’s conception of economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital to understand low-income students’ perceptions of their future career pathways. This study is a part of a National Science Foundation-funded program that provides need-based scholarships, internship connections, research opportunities, and entrepreneurial education to low-income students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, cybersecurity, or computer engineering. The program includes three large, public universities in the Southeast United States and was launched in September 2021. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 participants from one of the participating universities to gather information about their perceptions of professional, graduate school, and entrepreneurial career pathways. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic coding. We found that the majority of our low-income participants plan to work for a large technology-focused company immediately after graduation. However, some participants indicated that the program’s scholarship, which covers up to two years of graduate education in a computing field, gives them the ability to consider pursuing a master’s degree between completing their bachelor’s degree and entering the workforce. Additionally, though many participants expressed that the idea of becoming an entrepreneur is appealing, the financial risks associated with entrepreneurship deter them from considering this career pathway themselves. Ultimately, our findings suggest that financial stability is a crucial consideration for low-income computing students as they contemplate their future goals. The participants’ responses demonstrate the importance of need-based financial aid and internship connections for low-income computing students. Furthermore, our findings indicate that intervention programs that aim to support low-income students’ career development should be more sensitive to the unique perspectives and financial concerns of low-income students when they promote graduate school and entrepreneurial pathways.