The Rural Arkansas Information Technology Scholarships (RAITS) Program
SUMMARY
The CyberCollege of Arkansas was formed at UALR in 1999 by an Act of the Arkansas Legislature to address a severe statewide need for information technology workers. The knowledge-based companies of Arkansas have actively supported the creation of new undergraduate IT programs in the college. But four years of intense recruitment efforts have made plain the deficiencies of rural education in a rural state. With FIPSE and Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation support, the CyberCollege has developed and implemented a pre-calculus mathematics course that has been approved by the Arkansas Department of Education for high school credit. In 2002 the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation awarded $267,000 to support the extension of this course to 40 or more primarily rural high schools in eastern and southern Arkansas by 2005. In the Fall of 2003 over 300 students from 21 high schools are enrolled in the course with six more high schools already committed to making the course available in 2004. NSF is asked to join this partnership and support the CyberCollege’s effort to increase the number of freshmen from rural high schools by providing 30 scholarships annually to financially needy students. Without financial assistance qualified rural students will not travel to the city to prepare for IT careers.
Intellectual Merit: UALR is located in the center of the state and has traditionally served the four county Little Rock metropolitan region. The CyberCollege has so far drawn most of its students from this area. The Rural Arkansas Information Technology Scholarships (RAITS) program will provide both incentive and opportunity to qualified rural students and will therefore tap a new source of students for the state’s IT workforce. By virtue of its web-based outreach, the CyberCollege is developing a relationship with capable students during their senior year via their mathematics instructors and via this relationship we are begining to overcome the low aspiration level that keeps many rural students from seriously considering a college education and an IT career. The novel strategy of using distance learning technology to target academically disadvantaged rural high schools in the poorest area of the state simultaneously qualifies rural students for the IT curriculum at UALR and focuses recruitment on minority and female students. By combining Pell awards, Stafford loans that the state will repay for IT workers, a CSEMS award, work/study opportunity, and funds raised for its own scholarship program through its industry partners, the CyberCollege will be able to offer RAITS students a financial aid package that will permit them to be full-time residential students for four consecutive years. The CyberCollege will then enfold the RAITS students in an academic support system designed to insure a successful transition to college life.
Broader Impact: The RAITS program will cultivate a new outreach from a new college to a rural state that has recognized its critical need for an IT workforce throughout its boundaries. By recruiting through a high school mathematics enrichment program, RAITS will demonstrate how to effectively engage high school students from disadvantaged school districts to qualify for careers in information technology. This strategy could be readily emulated by other rural states, thus tapping a un-reached pool of students capable of contributing to the IT workforce. The CyberCollege bears responsibility for meeting a statewide need and must therefore develop recruitment and retention strategies that are effective with the state’s rural and minority population. However, this population views high tech education as remote and financially unobtainable, substituting instead local vo-tech education. The state has established an educational loan forgiveness program for IT workers that has so far had little payoff. This proposal seeks to demonstrate that with the addition of a focused scholarship incentive the various recruitment and retention pieces will reach critical mass.
PURPOSE: To attract qualified students from rural high schools in the low-income counties of southern and eastern Arkansas (the Delta) to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering (or “CyberCollege”). These students will be primarily minority, and a majority will be female due to our recruitment plan. The CyberCollege will offer financially needy students a comprehensive award package that will support them while obtaining a degree in an Information Technology (IT) discipline.
PRACTICE: The CyberCollege recruits traditional freshmen from throughout the state, but has found that rural high schools do not adequately prepare students for admission to Engineering and Computing curricula that expect freshmen to take calculus. The CyberCollege began four years ago to offer rural high schools a web-based pre-calculus course that would both improve the mathematic preparation of rural high school students and establish a link between the rural counties and the state’s only metropolitan university. The course was tested for two years in six urban high schools with teachers who were trained on the UALR campus in the summer and has been approved by the Arkansas Department of Education for high school credit. Students who have completed three years of high school mathematics can enroll in the web-based pre-calculus course for a fourth mathematics unit. In January 2002, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation awarded $267,000 to support the extension of this course to 40 or more primarily rural high schools in eastern and southern Arkansas [see the award letter and staff recruitment ad in supplementary documents]. Arkansas’s congressional delegation also arranged for a $200,000 federal award to support this program (see attached news release). Twenty-one high schools are participating in Fall 2003 with six more ready to begin in 2004.
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE: The benefit of better preparation cannot be realized if rural students consider that it is impractical for them to consider pursuing higher education in the big city. Thus, while the CyberCollege has greatly improved its recruitment channels throughout the state during its first four years, it has not significantly increased the flow of matriculating freshmen from outside the central region. Indeed, the CyberCollege has equal difficulty getting juniors to transfer from remote community colleges. In 2001 the CyberCollege obtained a one year CSEMS award to provide scholarships for transferring juniors, and, following two extensions, the last of this award was finally allocated in the spring of 2004, after broadening the eligibility to any level transfer student. This gave evidence that a scholarship for only one-third of the coast of attendance in a poor state with a low college attendance rate does not really increase opportunity.
The college therefore seeks to greatly expand its merit-based CyberScholars program by offering need-based scholarships to rural students who have been stimulated to consider careers in the state’s IT workforce, but these CSEMS awards will be only one component of a complete financial aid package. The Rural Arkansas Information Technology Scholarship (RAITS) will cover tuition, fees, books, and residence hall costs, and it will provide a stipend for board and supplies for both semesters of the freshman year. After the freshman year the RAITS students who have passed the first calculus course as part of earning 24 semester credits with a 3.0 GPA or higher and have declared an IT major in the CyberCollege will be renewed as CyberScholars, eligible for three additional years of tuition and stipends equivalent to the freshman RAITS package. The RAITS will be advertised throughout the state and any needy high school senior can apply, but the most effective recruitment efforts will occur in the rural high schools offering the web-based pre-calculus courses. This is where rural students who can score at least 21 on the ACT exam, have a minimum of 3.0 high school GPA, and place into Engineering Calculus or Trigonometry in their first college semester will be found, and where a relationship can be built that will empower these students to explore the high-tech culture offered by the CyberCollege. RAITS applications will be taken in March at participating high schools where the college math placement exam will be administered. Additional awards will be made at the start of the freshman semester and at mid-year, if funds remain, to those students who are financially needy, and who have qualified to enroll in calculus.
JUSTIFICATION FOR THE RAITS PROGRAM: The CyberCollege was formed in 1999 by an Act of the Arkansas Legislature to address a severe statewide need for IT workers. The CyberCollege’s IT undergraduate programs are: Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Information Science. While the CyberCollege also offers MS degrees and a Ph.D. in Applied Science that attracts graduate students from around the world, it is the only college of UALR with a statewide mission at the undergraduate level. It was formed to build new approaches to IT education and to promote a new kind of IT worker in the state.
Under the leadership of a new Chancellor and Provost, the University is presently engaged in developing a strategic plan, and the first fruits of that effort is a re-definition and broadening of the University’s mission statement. The creation of the CyberCollege with a legislative mandate to serve the state has awakened the institution to the realization that it has the opportunity to educate more than just the place-bound in the capital city. However, the intense recruitment efforts of the CyberCollege since its founding have made plain the deficiencies of rural education in a rural state. The CyberCollege created its own scholarship fund (CyberScholars) for the 2000-2001 academic year to support the best candidates that could be attracted, independent of need, into the new undergraduate programs, but barely half of the applicants met the calculus-ready criteria, necessitating that it be ignored. As a metropolitan university, UALR had not placed much emphasis on undergraduate recruitment previously and had offered few scholarships with its own funds to attract freshmen students to specific majors. The strategic planners are now questioning whether such indifference to scholarships is a factor in the recent stagnation of enrollment and the University’s lack of distinctiveness.
The only alternative to the CyberScholars program for applicants interested in IT is an EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technologies) scholarship. The Chancellor created the UALR EAST Lab Scholarships in 2000 to honor the EAST Lab initiative in Arkansas and to assist in the increasing use of technology in the state. The EAST Lab program seeks to use GIS technology to provide community services as a way to teach high school students how to think creatively and to use new technology as a tool for real-world problem solving. The history of the EAST initiative, tracking its rapid growth from its origin in one Arkansas high school to national influence, is summarized in the following table [www.eastproject.org]. The summary notes that UALR is the only university in the state that hosts an EAST lab for training teachers from around the state.
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Students who are graduates of a high school EAST program and who meet other academic requirements receive a full tuition and fees scholarship plus $2,500 toward housing, books, and educational materials (equivalent to about two-thirds of the $9000 projected cost of attendance). Each EAST Lab Scholar is expected to spend 10 hours per week as an undergraduate assistant in the College of Education EAST Lab, the UALR GIS Laboratory, suitable laboratories in the CyberCollege, or the UALR Neighborhood Homework Center. EAST Lab Scholars are also expected to participate in the activities of a UALR EAST Lab Club on campus. Scholarship awardees may major in any degree program offered by UALR, but preference is given to students who intend to be majors in programs leading to a teaching degree or any degree program in the CyberCollege. UALR EAST Lab Scholarships are renewable based upon completion of a minimum of 24 credit hours during the fall and spring semesters each year, and students must maintain a minimum cumulative grade point average of 3.25. The scholarship may be renewed for up to three years. There are currently sixteen EAST scholars matriculating in the CyberCollege-- seven finishing their second year. Only two of the nineteen current EAST scholars have arrived at UALR calculus ready. Our success in recruiting EAST scholars from among the 100 state high schools with EAST labs suggests that recruitment of scholars from the growing number of high schools with web-based pre-calculus courses, with whom we will have much more intimate contact, will succeed.
The CyberCollege raised funding for the CyberScholars program to $300,000 for 2003-2004, but the great majority of CyberScholar applicants come from Little Rock, its suburban high schools, and the Arkansas School for Science and Mathematics in Hot Springs. The RAITS program has therefore been designed to provide both incentive and opportunity to qualified rural students from the fringes of the State and will therefore tap a new source of students for the IT workforce.
DISTINCTIVE COMPONENTS OF THE RAITS PROGRAM
RECRUITMENT: The RAITS program will be geographically focused on rural counties, especially those in eastern and southern Arkansas, and especially on graduates of the CyberCollege’s independently funded web-based pre-calculus course. Recruitment in these high schools and in this pool of students will exploit the relationship that will be engendered with these students through their participation in the year-long pre-calculus course and the introduction that their mathematics teachers can give them to the CyberCollege from the teachers’ summer training experiences. The mystery usually associated with geographical distance will thus be dispelled at both ends. Therefore this channel for recruitment will certainly prove more productive than the other efforts at visiting high schools and attending college fairs. However, financially needy students abound in all of Arkansas, and all will be eligible for RAITS.
To the extent that the RAITS program can be focused on Arkansas’s rural southern and eastern edges, forty counties that have agricultural bases with corresponding low per capita incomes, it will be able to tap into a pool of underrepresented students. According to the Arkansas Department of Economic Development [1], Arkansas’s average per capita income ($22,257) in 2000 was 75% of the national average. However, eastern Arkansas’s per capita income ($20,164) in 2000 was 10% less than the State’s average. Southwestern Arkansas was only marginally more affluent in 2000 with a $21,559 per capita average, 3% below the State average. One of the difficulties impeding the development of industry in these agricultural counties is the lack of IT expertise in the workforce. The recruitment of students from these regions to the UALR CyberCollege offers hope that IT skills will become valued as a pathway to a college education, followed by the possibility that the CyberCollege graduates will seek out opportunities to exploit their skills in their hometowns. Similar to the rest of the nation’s employment projections for 1998-2008, Arkansas’s five fastest growing occupations are in the IT sectors: Computer Engineers 156%, Database Administrators 132%, Desktop Publishing Specialists 114%, Systems Analysts 111%, and Computer Support 105%.
The 40 rural counties that are the focus of the RAITS program are those with the largest minority populations in the State. As a whole, Arkansas is 19% non-white, but eastern Arkansas is 33% non-white, and southwestern Arkansas is 23% non-white. UALR is an open admissions metropolitan college, and enrolls 32% non-white undergraduate students (the largest community of minority college students in the state). The CyberCollege has been given a statewide mission to offer undergraduates IT preparation that is unique in the state. Our challenge is to make Arkansas high schools aware of our special mission and to develop a context that will support students who must leave home to matriculate. Because of its history, UALR has the educational services that support first-generation college students, and it has a minority-friendly culture. It lacks only the tradition of attracting students beyond its three-county commuting distance.
Eastern Arkansas Counties Southwestern Arkansas Counties
Although many of the high schools in the rural areas do not offer four years of mathematics, not all have high-speed web access in computer labs to be able to offer the web-based pre-calculus courses. The 114 high schools in the forty counties of Eastern and Southwestern Arkansas that do have Internet labs are shown in the table below with the total size of their junior and senior classes in 2001 and their racial demographics. These high schools are the prime candidates for expanding the web course [2]. Racially, 28% of these high schools are minority white, and 48% (shaded entries) are 30% or more African-American (including seven current participants in the web-based pre-calculus course). In the summer of 2003 the CyberCollege hosted a department of education sponsored summer workshop for high school mathematics teachers, attracting 47, to improve mathematics education by teaching the use of graphics calculators and to inform them about the web-based pre-calculus course. 47% came from the forty targeted counties, 74% were female and 51% were African-American. Enrollment in the web-based pre-calculus course has grown from 139 students in the fall of 2001 (49% female and 43% African-American, and 43% in the targeted counties), to 367 in the fall of 2003 (with the impetus of external funding), 44% in the forty counties, 30% African-American, and 55% female. Thus, as the web-based pre-calculus course is incorporated into more rural high schools across the state, it is growing equally rapidly in the forty counties that hold the most underrepresented students.
THE FINANCIAL AID PACKAGE: RAITS will be focused on freshman students who would probably not attend a four-year college without financial aid. The aid package will cover all the costs of attendance in the freshman year so that acceptance of the scholarship will preclude any
Candidate RAITS high schools (bolded are already hosting a web-based math course)
|
Education Cooperative |
Counties |
On-line HS |
Fall 2001 Juniors & Seniors |
|
Arkansas River |
Arkansas, Grant, Jefferson |
Altheimer-Unified |
81 (0%) |
|
Great Rivers |
Lee, Monroe, Phillips, St. Francis, Woodruff |
250 (2%) |
|
|
South Central Arkansas |
Calhoun, Columbia, Ouachita, Union |
Bearden |
110 (56%) |
|
Southeast Arkansas |
Ashley, Bradley, Chicot, Cleveland, Desha, Drew, Lincoln |
Arkansas City |
19 (42%) |
|
Southwest Arkansas |
Hempstead, Lafayette, Miller, Nevada |
Blevins |
64
(43%) |
|
Crowley's Ridge |
Craighead, Crittenden, Cross, |
Nettleton |
309 (89%) |
|
Northeast Arkansas |
Clay, Greene |
Corning |
149 (97%) |
|
DeQueen/Mena |
Polk, Sevier, |
DeQueen |
196 (71%) |
|
Dawson |
Clark, Dallas, Garland, Hot Spring, Pike |
Bismarck |
142 (96%) |
off-campus employment during the freshman year. The Arkansas State Department of Higher Education released a study in July 2001 [3] that augmented and explained the findings of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education a year earlier [4]. Arkansas ranks 49th in degrees per capita, 47th in baccalaureate graduation in five years, and 46th in freshman to sophomore retention of the 50 states. The State study found that lack of success in college was not solely related to inadequate K-12 preparation but was attributable in large measure to the State’s culture and its financing of higher education.
A high percentage of the State’s college
students are impacted by the following risk factors: weak academic preparation, meager financial aid, relatively
high proportion part-time students, low priority for education,
non-traditional age, low educational aspirations, and uneducated parents. These factors overlap. Students don’t qualify for financial aid
because they only take part-time loads to leave time for a full-time job. Students drop out after high school, so 40%
of college students are non-traditional.
Poor families contribute little to support college students, and college
students from low socio-economic backgrounds loath borrowing to pay for
college. (The State is 12th lowest in the nation in the amount of
student debt.) Those states with the
highest student debts are also the states with the highest baccalaureate
completion rates.
To combat the low-aspiration, low commitment approach to higher education, the RAITS program is focused on ensuring that the rural student successfully completes the freshman year. All the RAITS students will be housed in the UALR residence hall on a floor with 56 beds that has been reserved for CyberCollege students. The RAITS award is described officially in a letter from the director of Financial Aid that is attached, but it totals $11,325 (a Pell award (an average of $3,000); a CSEMS award of $3,125; a subsidized Stafford Loan for $2,500; $1,500 through on-campus work/study of 10 hours per week, and $1200 from the state). The Stafford Loan will be repaid by the Arkansas Technical Careers Student Loan Forgiveness Program, which forgives loan amounts up to $2,500 per academic year (not to exceed a maximum amount of $10,000) per student when the student works in the State after graduation. Tuition and fees for the year is $3000, a bed in a residence hall suite is $1,375 per semester, and books and supplies average $450 a semester. Board and incidental living expenses at $20/day for 224 days totals $4480, leaving $195 for travel home. Students with extra financial need will be offered up to an additional 10 hours a week of on-campus work, monitoring labs, working in the library, or assisting in departmental offices. Student Services provide a variety of free academic and counseling services as well as health services that are easily accessed by on-campus students.
The novelty of the RAITS program is that by placing the out-of-town student on campus, all of the expenses of attending UALR can be met by the RAITS award without encumbering the student with repayable debt (on the assumption that an in-state IT career is the student’s goal). The remaining components of the RAITS program seek to insure that qualified scholars attain this goal in four years (financed by continuing Pell grants, forgivable Stafford loans, and CyberScholar fellowships). The risks from the scholar’s perspective are therefore minimized, and consequently, the opportunity to attempt a college degree will be perceived as both real and realistic. RAITS will provide scholars an alternative to the more “sensible” strategy of working their ways through college part-time--a strategy that has failed repeatedly already in the short life of the CyberCollege, even for CyberScholars. Only half of the 22 initial CyberScholars qualified for renewal but in the next two classes the renewal rate rose to two-thirds. CyberScholars have received books, tuition, and fees, plus a $2,500 stipend for room and board--a total just over $7,000--which has led most to take part-time jobs off campus (most are not financially needy although their parents do not contribute significantly to their educational expenses). Last year one CyberScholar sought Director Young’s help because he didn’t have enough money for insurance on his new car. He was already working 5 days a week at Sonic and had squeezed all his courses onto Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is the faculty’s perception that the single greatest contributor to poor freshman performance is lack of time devoted to academic tasks. The expectation is that by restricting RAITS students to on-campus work the historical attrition rate of scholarship holders can be decreased.
THE FRESHMAN ACADEMIC CONTRACT: Experience with the first three cohorts of CyberScholars has taught the CyberCollege that even bright freshman experience difficulties adjusting to academic requirements at the university level, particularly mathematics.
- RAITS scholars will have the advantage of specific mathematics preparation, but other precautions will be required of them. When the third cohort of CyberScholars entered fall of 2003, the CyberCollege instituted a required one-credit seminar. It brought all the freshman scholars together once a week and engaged in a variety of activities from presentations by the department chairs and local employers to discussions with upper-classmen to mentored team-projects and presentations about campus resources. RAITS scholars will join this seminar and will thereby make very helpful friends.
- The second strategy that the CyberCollege will employ to ease the adjustment of RAITS scholars will be to sub-divide these students into cohorts based upon which of the three degrees they intend to earn. Each cohort will have a Co-PI from that department as a mentor and an older CyberScholar from that department as a guide.
- The third strategy will be to group the RAITS scholars by their fall mathematics courses, trigonometry or calculus, and then to arrange their first semester class schedules so that all will be enrolled in the same trigonometry or calculus section, and each degree cohort will be enrolled in the same section of each freshman major’s course. By advising and scheduling in this manner, the RAITS students will find themselves in the residence hall each evening with compatriots studying the same assignments. They will also find that each evening, a CyberScholar will be present in the residence hall to supervise a study session. This will supplement the work of the CyberScholar who is their department guide and who provides tutoring in the major courses during the day. RAITS students, as do all students in the CyberCollege, have access to the college help desk 60 hours a week.
Since all of the RAITS students will be enrolled in a small number of sections within the college (8-10), it will be easy for the CyberCollege’s Director of Academic Services and the co-PI faculty mentors to keep track of their progress. CyberScholar tutors will turn in attendance sheets with their time sheets so that the Director will be able to measure each student’s level of participation weekly. If a RAITS student fails to thrive, it will be detected quickly, and the Co-PI mentor will intervene. RAITS students will clearly understand that they are full-time students with the responsibility to make good grades, something they are used to doing and want to continue doing. Their academic support team functions to keep them focused on their tasks, helping them avoid distractions and careless behavior.
SCHOLARSHIP RENEWAL AND SERVICE ACTIVITIES: RAITS is a need-based scholarship program for freshmen. Those who fulfill the requirements of the freshman year award will be enrolled as CyberScholars for the sophomore year. In their sophomore and subsequent years, CyberScholars are expected to contribute (compensated by college extra labor funds) to the CyberCollege by tutoring, working the help desk, or providing leadership in student clubs for 10 hours a week. Some CyberScholars will conduct the nightly study sessions in the residence hall, while others will work in their major departments as freshman guides and tutors.
Fifty CyberScholars are currently being supported from the CyberCollege’s operating funds and from a scholarship pool contributed by public and private entities. Scholarship students who entered as RAITS students will continue to qualify for Pell and Stafford funds, and the CSEMS award will be replaced with CyberScholar funds for three remaining years. Sophomore CyberScholars usually move into off-campus housing, so space will be made available for the next 30 RAITS students. All the CyberScholars are currently monitored by the Director of Academic Services and by their faculty advisors, but the establishment of the RAITS program will allow its mentoring structures to be broadly applied, creating the more consistent reporting and feedback that are commensurate with the much larger scholarship endeavor.
MANAGEMENT OF THE RAITS PROGRAM: The Co-PIs will manage the RAITS program while the PI and her staff, Al Hampton, Assistant Dean for Recruitment and Diversity Affairs,and Director of Academic Services, Katherine Young, handle the administrative details. Dean Hampton’s staff manages the web-based pre-calculus course and is responsible for coordinating all of the CyberCollege’s recruitment activities. He is the administrator of the three-year Winthrop Rockefeller grant and supervises the three grant employees who are tasked with expanding the web-based calculus course. His team will be responsible for orienting the high school teachers about the RAITS program and for coordinating with the rural high schools to encourage applications from the qualified participants.
Director Young provides admissions and advising services to entering students and is responsible for financial aid awards. She developed and administers the CyberScholars program and the freshman seminar and, therefore, has already encountered all the problems that will arise with the RAITS initiative. She maintains close contact with the current CyberScholars and tracks their academic performance. She has counseled those who exhibit problems, arranged for tutors, adjusted schedules, and provided personal counseling and moral support when needed. She will be responsible for assessing the qualifications of applicants and putting together the RAITS award package for each. She will also be responsible for arranging for payment of on-campus expenses and for ensuring that the course schedules developed by the faculty mentors meet the requirements of the scholarship.
The pattern of CyberScholar applicants predicts that in the first year, thirteen RAITS freshmen will choose Computer Science; seven will choose Information Science; and ten will choose Systems Engineering. We anticipate that half the scholars will be placed into trigonometry by the Mathematics Department’s placement test. The Co-PIs in each of the three undergraduate IT programs have discussed with their colleagues in their departments the efforts that the department will expend to support the Co-PIs in mentoring RAITS students.
As in the other departments, the computer science faculty plan to recruit junior/senior computer science majors to serve as peer mentors for RAITS students. These mentors will not only serve as “models”, but will help smooth the transition from high school to college, help navigate through the bureaucratic maze which often presents itself to new students, and, in general, supply encouragement and moral support when needed. Dr. Minsker is already responsible for advising most of the freshman CS majors, and he will take special pains to shepherd RAITS students exploring Computer Science. As he does for all scholarship students, he will provide early monitoring of student progress in freshman CS classes to Ms. Young.
Dr. Hussain Al-Rizzo in Systems Engineering, in addition to coordinating the department’s scholar mentors, will develop a monthly seminar series for all of the scholarship students that will present four seminars each spring. He plans to coordinate with the student clubs in each of the departments so that each will select a topic and then assist them in obtaining a speaker. RAITS students will have a freshman scholars seminar every other week in the fall semester, conducted by Director Young, and then four scholars seminars in the spring semester organized by Dr. Al-Rizzo. In the remaining three years the continuing CyberScholars will attend and help conduct each of the seminar series.
In addition to providing peer mentors the Information Science faculty, led by Dr. Ningning Wu, plans to set up an academic sistership so that every new female student would be appointed to a senior female student who can mentor and offer the help for academic related problems. The Information Science faculty will take the lead in this effort because there are four female faculty in the Department, but the two female faculty in Computer Science will assist them. These faculty and upper class women will offer support to all the female RAITS freshmen.
PROGRAM ASSESSMENT: The RAITS program will more than double the number of scholarship students entering the CyberCollege as freshmen. The objectives of the program are
- To recruit students for the CyberCollege from the rural areas of the state, outside metropolitan Little Rock.
- To recruit well prepared minority students from disadvantaged high schools
- To increase the four-year and five-year graduation rates of all scholarship students by instituting a support system that works for RAITS students.
- Eliminate the need for off-campus part-time jobs
- Build classroom cohorts in the freshman year
- Provide structured academic assistance
- Provide peer and faculty mentoring
- To graduate more high tech employees for the knowledge-based companies of Arkansas.
The success of the RAITS program will be measured first by the identification of at least 60 qualified RAITS applicants annually. Dean Hampton will be able to focus on the most successful of the 300 students presently enrolled in the web-based pre-calculus course who will constitute a “captive” audience, receptive to extended counseling and qualified for admission to the CyberCollege. However, having already built relationships with high school counselors across the state that has resulted in the CyberCollege attracting freshmen from 70% of the state’s counties, Dean Hampton is well positioned to generate this pool. During the four years of NSF-CSEMS support, participation in the web-based pre-calculus course will more than double, increasing the CyberCollege’s contact with minority students in rural counties so that after three years the pool of qualified applicants will be 50% female and 50% African-American.
Even with the dramatic increase in the pool, recruiting from this captive audience is not trivial because many of these students will have offers to many universities (some closer to home). In those rural high schools where there was not previously a fourth-year of mathematics offered, there may not be any role models of students succeeding in technology studies in distant universities. Identifying and convincing the right students who will flourish in the CyberCollege will be an arduous task that is not complete until the students arrive on campus. Dean Hampton and his staff, working under the Rockefeller grant, are focused on giving students in rural high schools, particularly those with high minority enrollments and weak mathematics offerings, the opportunity to obtain the mathematical preparation to succeed in a science or technology program in college. In training teachers and supervising the delivery of the course Dean Hampton and his staff are building a relationship with the mathematics personnel in each school. Dean Hampton’s long experience in minority recruitment for engineering equips him to work with these teachers to identify and motivate able students to consider an IT career. The progress made through the web-based course by these prospective applicants will be tracked and Dean Hampton and Director Young can prepare a RAITS presentation knowing the student’s interests and family circumstances. It is the specific goal of this means of recruitment to find, encourage, and invite underrepresented female and minority students to aspire to an IT career made feasible by a RAITS scholarship.
The second measure of success will be acquiring 30 matriculants annually. It will be Director Young’s challenge to arrange for accepted RAITS scholars to arrive and register for full loads each fall. Director Young orchestrates campus visits and collaborates with the campus admissions and financial aid offices in developing award offers to scholars. She will develop a summer orientation program for students and families and team with each department’s faculty mentor to see that each scholar’s fall class schedule is build around the cohort block of mathematics and major courses. Scholars will be registered for their classes in the summer, and all arrangements will be made for their arrival on campus at the start of the semester. In evaluating scholarship offers Director Young will have CyberScholar awards for highly meritorious students independent of need, and RAITS awards for qualified students with financial need. In either case her goal is to use scholarship funds to increase the diversity of the students in the Cybercollege. Because of the contribution to the pool produced by the web-based pre-calculus course, 35% women and 25% African-American students will be an obtainable goal for every freshman class of scholarship students.
The third measure of success will be renewal rate. We expect that 25 of the first RAITS cohort will qualify for CyberScholar awards their sophomore year. With a larger pool in subsequent years, this renewal rate should rise by 1 each of the three following years. Correlating the level of participation in help sessions with academic performance will yield some insight into the kind of difficulties scholars encounter in making the transition to college. Input from mentors and guides will identify more specifically the concepts that tutoring should emphasize. The renewal rate will rise as the support system conforms more closely to the needs that the scholars must strengthen.
The fourth measure of success will be graduation rates. By the end of the fourth year of the program, at least 18 of the first RAITS cohort should have been graduated. The mission of the CyberCollege is to rapidly expand Arkansas’s IT workforce, and this is to be done in the face of current statistics indicating that less than 20% of traditional-aged students in Arkansas graduate in four years. With refinement of our support system we expect to raise to 21, 24, and 27 the RAITS graduates in the fifth, sixth, and seventh year of the program.
The RAITS students themselves will contribute the fifth measure of success. The freshman RAITS students will meet in the scholars seminar at least twice a month during the fall, and part of the seminar’s agenda is to discuss problems that students face. At the end of the semester, a written survey is collected to gather student opinion on the usefulness of the seminar activities. (See the survey summary from Fall 2002 in attachments.) These group surveys will be complemented by end-of-semester interviews conducted by Director Young and PI Mary Good that will guide both scholars and staff toward better performance the following semester. The RAITS students will also be asked in these interviews to reflect on the recruitment process as they experienced it. Director Young will also conduct a survey of the parents of the RAITS students each fall to collect information that will help her present the RAITS program more effectively in the spring to parents of the students in the web-based courses.
The final measure of success will come from the CyberCollege faculty who teach the RAITS students. The faculty Co-PIs will visit monthly with the faculty in their departments who teach the freshman course and solicit their assessment of the RAITS students. At the end of each semester the Co-PIs will meet and compare notes and plan what improvements are needed in the scholars support infrastructure.
The RAITS program will accomplish its goal because it’s design addresses what we perceive to be the two most critical attrition factors, first by investing in students who have been properly prepared to pursue the CyberCollege curricula and second by enabling these scholars to be full-time students with the time to give their best efforts to academics. Our assessment procedures will systematically monitor all the activities of the RAITS program from recruitment to completion of the first year in a manner that will trigger adaptations. Quantitative measures and individual accountability will be the drivers of the assessment and the continuous improvement of the scholar support system:
1. A pool of at least 60 qualified applicants, 50% of which will be female and 50% of which will be African-American by the third year of the project. These goals will direct the efforts of Dean Hampton’s team.
2. Matriculation of 30 RAITS freshmen each year of the project, at least 10 of whom will be women and at least 7 of which will be African-American (Director Young).
3. Matriculation of 25 RAITS freshmen to CyberScholars at the end of the first year, 26 of the second year’s freshmen, 27 of the third class, and 28 of the fourth class of RAITS freshmen (faculty Co-PIs).
4. Graduation of 18 of the first 30 RAITS students at the end of the four-year project. We will work to graduate 21 of the second class in four years, 24 of the third, and 27 of the fourth class in four years (faculty Co-PIs).
5. We intend that 80% of our RAITS scholars and their parents will be evaluate the overall effectiveness of the RAITS recruitment and retention activities as “Very Good”, or “Excellent” on a 5-point scale, and that we will learn each semester how to better fine tune the experience (Dean Good).
6. We intend that 90% of the CyberCollege instructors of RAITS freshmen will rate the RAITS students “well prepared” and “well motivated” in their classes and that we will gain useful feedback from the RAITS students that the Co-PIs can communicate to these instructors that will improve the effectiveness of the freshman curriculum (Dean Good).
DISSEMINATION: The RAITS program will cultivate a new outreach from a new college to a rural state that has recognized its critical need for an IT workforce throughout its boundaries. By exploiting distance-learning technology and by recruiting productively through a high school mathematics enrichment program, the RAITS program will demonstrate another strategy for effectively engaging high school students from disadvantaged school districts to qualify for careers in information technology. This strategy could be readily emulated by other rural states, thus tapping an un-reached pool of students capable of contributing to the IT workforce. The results will be reported in the IT Deans Group by Dr. Good, and in the workforce community through the CyberCollege’s involvement in NSF’s IT Workforce program which is deriving and dissemination strategies to attract underrepresented groups into the IT workforce.
Just as importantly, the knowledge-based companies of Arkansas who prompted the legislature to fund the CyberCollege are vitally interested in graduates, especially graduates who will stay and work in the state. The RAITS students, because of their rural connections and the loan forgiveness program, will be excellent employee prospects. We have proposed that for each RAITS student hired that the knowledge-based company commit to replenishing the RAITS scholarship fund $3500 for each of the first four years that they employ the student. This will serve to institutionalize the RAITS program after the expiration of NSF support, and thus it will be the goal of the PI to establish this contract with as many of the CyberCollege’s corporate supporters [list attached] as possible during the period of NSF support.
RURAL ARKANSAS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SCHOLARSHIPS
The UALR CyberCollege has been created with a mission to serve Arkansas [6]. Its location in central Arkansas at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is significant in its establishment, and this circumstance has accounted for the fact that most students in its programs are from Pulaski County. The CyberCollege’s mission, however, to be the CyberCollege of Arkansas, cannot be met if only the largest urban high schools in the State are courted to send students. Thus, the RAITS program is proposed to help the CyberCollege have a truly statewide presence in order to meet the specific needs of higher education for rural Arkansas.
The CyberCollege is doing things differently from the style of other colleges at UALR, and it has enjoyed a special relationship with the State’s IT companies from its beginning. Its CyberScholars program is modeled on the university-wide EAST program and is the first college-specific scholarship program at the University. The RAITS program is modeled on the CyberScholars program, but it intends to meet the full cost of attendance and to prohibit recipients from adding off-campus employment to their time commitments. The RAITS program will be the first scholarship program at UALR to recruit a significant number of its students through a college-sponsored high school preparatory course (pre-calculus mathematics) so that it will have first-hand knowledge of the scholar’s preparation for the rigors of the IT curricula. The RAITS program will place focus on students from 40 rural counties with below average incomes and above average minority populations and offer them a real opportunity to obtain a college education in four years and graduate into a labor-short IT marketplace in Arkansas, while having all their educational loans forgiven. Because the web-based pre-calculus course targets minority high schools in the Arkansas Delta region, the RAITS program will have the opportunity to reach qualified minority students and attract them to the CyberCollege.
The RAITS program will model a better way to recruit Arkansas students into the UALR CyberCollege and its management practices will improve the both CyberScholar and EAST scholarship programs that have followed the traditional model of offering scholars half of what it actually costs to matriculate. These programs seemed reasonable when it was assumed that scholars would live at home and commute to classes, the normal situation for a metropolitan university. The special mission of UALR’s CyberCollege is inconsistent with that assumption; therefore, the CyberCollege must pioneer a new scholarship model, and RAITS will be the prototype. This prototype fits the mission of the CyberCollege and will become integral to the CyberCollege’s success, and therefore all the resources needed to make the program successful will be forthcoming. The CyberCollege has already funded staff positions to operate the pre-college mathematics course; it has developed the statewide recruiting effort that is required to promote high technology education in a rural state; and it is already about the business of building the academic infrastructure, the faculty, the laboratories, and the support services, that are expected of a flagship program for the State. In doing so, it has awakened the entire University to re-examine the mission of this particular metropolitan institution, with the result that a new appreciation of UALR’s statewide role is being added to UALR’s strategic plan.
The CyberCollege has learned some initial lessons from the CyberScholars and EAST scholarship programs and is, therefore, much better prepared to propagate and manage the RAITS effort. The CyberCollege is still so young that its two signature programs have just graduated their first students, but it is maturing rapidly, and its reputation in Arkansas is growing. The RAITS program will benefit from this increased maturity and visibility.