BOARD #135: The 2TO4 Project-Facilitated Transition from 2-Year to 4-Year Electrical and Computer Engineering Studies by Building Student/Faculty Networks (WIP)
Conference
Connor, KA, Velez-Reyes, M, Sullivan, BJ et al. (2025). BOARD #135: The 2TO4 Project-Facilitated Transition from 2-Year to 4-Year Electrical and Computer Engineering Studies by Building Student/Faculty Networks (WIP)
. 2011 ASEE ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXPOSITION, 10.18260/1-2--55952
Connor, KA, Velez-Reyes, M, Sullivan, BJ et al. (2025). BOARD #135: The 2TO4 Project-Facilitated Transition from 2-Year to 4-Year Electrical and Computer Engineering Studies by Building Student/Faculty Networks (WIP)
. 2011 ASEE ANNUAL CONFERENCE & EXPOSITION, 10.18260/1-2--55952
The Innovative Engineering Consortium (IEC) is a nonprofit organization that facilitates collective efforts through equitable partnerships between its 21 MSI core members, 15 PWI affiliate members, 8 corporate members and other collaborating organizations. The IEC 2TO4 Project builds on its Pathways to Success program to support students who begin their studies at a community college (CC) or other 2-year institution by providing financial support, mentoring and other personalized transition support, professional guidance, and community engagement. The 2TO4 network of CCs consists of 20 sub-networks (nodes) built around the 20 4-year MSIs that are core IEC members. The vision of 2TO4 is to double the total number of students following this pathway to their BS degree in ECE by sharing promising practices and providing robust transition support infrastructure and increased financial support for CC students. Participating CCs become members of IEC and engage in equitable partnerships with 4-year MSIs and PWIs, industry and DoD labs to implement the various building blocks of 2TO4. During the first year of this multi-year effort, a base version of 2TO4 was created. Program leadership began working through institutional challenges with the 60+ program partners and the first cohort of more than two dozen student participants was selected. Some nodes worked from the beginning, while others presented a steep learning curve for all involved. During the second year of the project, the number of students participating increased, and support infrastructure and programs expanded. The IEC guiding principles of Asset Driven Equitable Partnerships (aka ADEP, developed by IEC) were used to build connections between 4-year and 2-year institutions by co-creating and co-delivering new learning opportunities. In the third year of the project, new programmatic elements are focused on the very different and geographic distant student experiences at the 20 local hubs because transfer processes and local support infrastructures vary greatly by institution and state. Supported students will be brought together in-person in March 2025 to build their personal professional networks by working together on mentored teams. 2TO4 assessment is focused on the extent to which each programmatic component is implemented with fidelity and whether the program has built the necessary capacity to support students. Formative feedback from each participant is collected and student progress is tracked. Key to the success of the project is building and maintaining trust and equitable partnerships, along with continuous programmatic improvement. The developing student-faculty networks described above have resulted from the identification of both problems and opportunities. As this work progresses, the project team is collecting information on promising practices that help recruit and retain both student and faculty participants, that have the potential to sustain this effort beyond the period of DoD funding, that can impact ECE education writ large (not just for CC transfers), and, especially, whether the 2-to 4-year pathway can significantly increase the number of ECE graduates.
