New accreditation will help BE STEM create more paths to college

An equity-centered program at the University of Pittsburgh aiming to expand access to STEM education has reached an important milestone.

Broadening Equity in STEM (BE STEM) is now an accredited learning service provider according to the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools.

BE STEM is one of several federal research initiatives under the STEM PUSH Network, which is a National Science Foundation-funded effort to develop a formal standard for pre-college STEM programs. The goal is to help them become more fairly evaluated by admissions departments at universities, which will ultimately help participating students succeed.

“Higher education admissions departments have had no way to uniformly account for the value that these pre-college programs bring,” said Alison Slinskey Legg, a teaching professor in biological sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the director of BE STEM at Pitt. “They’re often not factored in, or thought of as light extracurricular when in fact, these programs are doing a lot of the heavy, educational work that students often aren’t getting in their formal K-12 schooling.”

This lack of consideration by college admissions was the impetus for BE STEM’s push for accreditation.

“Some of our most spectacular students were not getting into colleges that they should’ve easily gotten into based on the work they were doing in our labs,” Legg said. In talking with faculty who ran other pre-college programs, she heard the same story.

The young participants were advancing real research in university labs, but it wasn’t helping them get into school.

“We realized, no one is even looking at our programs,” Legg said.

Led by Pitt assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics David Boone, STEM PUSH is conducting a longitudinal tracking study of college-going of students from the 40-plus pre-college programs.

The study is ongoing, but the preliminary results show Black, Latino/a/e and Indigenous students in pre-college STEM programs so far matriculate and persist through at least one year of college at a much higher rate than nonparticipant applicants to those same programs. The study has also found that 81% of Black, Latino/a/e and Indigenous students in STEM PUSH programs examined persisted in STEM for more than one year in college. This suggests that pre-college STEM programs may have an impact on the diversity of STEM fields, and an impact on the lives of students who participate.

“We’re really just validating, objectively, what those of us that have run pre-college programs have always known,” Legg said.

— Brandie Jefferson, photography by Johnathan Wright