Institution SHPE: Leading Hispanics in STEM State California Academic Level Community-Based Organization Issue Area Access Website https://shpe.org/engage/programs/scholarshpe/ Key Personnel Ashleigh Tierney Program Focus Scholarship Overview The mission of SHPE’s scholarship program is to empower the Hispanic community to realize its fullest potential and to impact the world through STEM awareness, access, support, and development. The scholarship program is designed to specifically target the financial barriers related to the completion of a higher education degree. The scholarships provided through this program maximize the opportunity for recipients to focus on learning and consequently increase the likelihood of degree completion. Program Goals: Increase the graduation rate to over 70% for ScholarSHPE recipients. Increase the impact of the program by awarding over 375 scholarships in 2023-2024. Program Description Awards vary from $500 to $25,000 per student per academic year and are awarded based on financial need and the quality of essay responses. Scholarship awards are disbursed directly to students to maximize support beyond institutional aid. SHPE also changed the award timeline so that students receive their award notifications earlier. This effort may impact where they attend in the Fall and ensures that students receive the scholarship dollars before the start of the semester. Additionally, SHPE began offering financial literacy support during the 2021-2022 scholarship cycle. Recipients are now required to complete 10 financial literacy modules. Outcome This data focuses on undergraduate ScholarSHPE recipients that self-identify as Latino and that started college between 2015 and 2020. This includes a total of 204 ScholarSHPE recipients whose data was available from the National Clearinghouse StudentTracker database to document graduation. Data shows that 55% of these undergraduate students have graduated and 8% are still enrolled. When we compare this to the graduation rate from members that are not scholarship recipients (47%), we found that ScholarSHPE recipients are 9% more likely to graduate which is statistically significant (p-value of 0.021). ScholarSHPE recipients are also forecasted to be approximately 25% more likely to graduate than their peers pursuing bachelor's degrees in engineering. The number of awards has also seen significant growth. 175 awards were disbursed in 2020-21, 245 in 2021-22, and 340 in 2022-23. This consistent growth in awards sets the foundation to meet the goal of 375 ScholarSHPEs in 2023-24. Learn more about Latino College Completion in California Return to Growing What Works Database
