Academic achievement and retention in a minority engineering program

The Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU) was awarded funding in 2003 as a part of 13 five-year block grants given to colleges and universities that year. The funding was given by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) for a program to increase the number of underrepresented minority students (African American, Hispanic, and Native American) enrolled in engineering and to increase their retention and graduation rates to that comparable for non-minority students. This successful NACME program at ASU has now completed four years of programming and has now had 73 students who have held NACME Scholarships. This paper looks at the NACME program lessons learned, the retention of the NACME cohorts relative to non-minority students and to minority students who did not attend the NACME program, the academic achievement of the students, and areas of the program which could improve. The paper includes the summary of the semester evaluations submitted by the students.