Work in progress — Reporting S-STEM retention: New diversity vs. Supporting existing diversity

The Scientific Leadership Scholars (SLS) Program is an NSF S-STEM sponsored scholarship for financially and academically eligible students in Computer Science, Environmental Resources Engineering and Mathematics at Humboldt State University. The scholarship has sponsored 57 students in these majors over the past 4 years. Of these students, 54% were underrepresented minorities and 70% were underrepresented in STEM. The first group (Group 1) of students recruited to the program brought additional diversity to the three academic programs. To fill the spots vacated by SLS students who no longer met the requirements of the SLS program after their first or second years, additional SLS students were recruited from existing CS, ERE and Math majors. This second group (Group 2) drew from existing diversity in the three SLS programs. The retention outcomes of these two groups are quite different due to the nature of the populations. As far as the authors know, no other work has operationalized the concept of supporting existing diversity in this way.