Overview
The Community College Compass project will advance efforts in the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program within the National Science Foundation (NSF) by forming a consortium of partners to develop and implement guided pathways into the Geosciences that will engage students across community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) system.
This NSF-funded project is led by the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and has brought together faculty members, departmental advisors, and Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) representatives from CUNY’s community colleges.
CUNY’s community colleges are demographically diverse, comprising groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the Geosciences and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The Community College Compass project is aiming to establish the guidelines needed to implement Geoscience-specific guided pathways, which are a student-centered and structured approaches to community college education. Our community college partners include: the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), Bronx Community College, Guttman Community College, Hostos Community College, LaGuardia Community College, and Queensborough Community College.
Our initiative focuses on building guided pathway components in the Geosciences across our partner sites in order to offer students highly structured learning experiences in which they are provided with clear academic and professional goals, cohesive academic programs, and aligned support services to assist them along their career and educational paths. Rather than create a one-size-fits-all guided pathway across all partner sites, our project aims to design elements of guided pathways that can be integrated over time into existing programs and departments.
