Work in progress - establishing and maintaining successful community college partnerships

Four-year universities exhibit very low two-year retention within engineering fields. Community colleges represent an attractive source to replace those cohort losses with upper division transfer students. The community college system, however, is often used inefficiently by those students, who often find that they have much longer courses of study remaining after they arrive at a university to study engineering. Summer internships that expose community college students to the university environment and to engineering design processes are a valuable tool to ease student transition. Distance education offerings of introductory engineering courses improve curriculum efficiency. Increased student awareness and communication with university faculty and specialized advisors will improve student recruiting and retention through this valuable state resource.