Performing Department
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Non Technical Summary
Two California Community Colleges, Hartnell College and Imperial Valley College, and two four-year universities, California State University Monterey Bay and the University of Arizona, Yuma, will engage in a Tier 2 partnership to build and sustain the future workforce in food and agriculture sciences through Student Scholarships, Experiential Learning, and Outreach and Engagement Projects. The project will scale and grow existing student support and career development programs and be built on a core of four agricultural degree/transfer-track pathways in: Agriculture Business Management; Agriculture Food Safety; Agriculture Plant Science; and Industrial Automation/Mechatronics.The project will lead students from high school to clear agricultural career pathways, resulting in employment in industry and USDA, while advancing equity. The partners all serve heavily agricultural regions with large populations of underrepresented, educationally disadvantaged and low income residents. The project will enroll over 850 eligible students, achieve a transfer rate more than six times the current rate, and increase credential completion rate by 10% (certificate, associate and bachelor's) while improving the lives of all participants.This project's goals align with the primary NEXTGEN program goal to engage, recruit, retain, train, and support students to help build and sustain the next generation of the food and agriculture workforce, including the future USDA workforce. It will accomplish this by supporting USDA program priorities, including, providing student scholarship support, meaningful paid internships, job opportunity matching, and facilitating opportunities through extensive outreach and engagement to promote the processes and pathways leading to training and employment in industry and at USDA.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
The L2L project will build on and scale-up pathways in four high-skill agricultural associate and baccalaureate degree programs leading to high growth occupations in which Latinx students and women are severely underrepresented. The four pathways are:Agriculture Plant Science; Agriculture Food Safety; Agriculture Business Management; and Industrial Automation/Mechatronics. The project will feature extensive high school outreach and engagement. Students will be recruited through the partner community colleges for the first two years of instruction and then can transfer to one of the four-year universities to complete their degree. The program will be designed to facilitate multiple on and off ramps for students to acquire needed skills, complete certificates or degrees, and transfer to a four-year program. This flexibility will enable the partners to meet specific student needs. The project will increase enrollment, improve retention and transfer rates, and increase degree-completion and completion velocity for participating students. Long-term, the project will contribute to workforce equity in the targeted occupations.Meeting USDA program priorities. This project's goals, discussed above, align with the primary NEXTGEN program goal to, "engage, recruit, retain, train, and support students in order to help build and sustain the next generation of the food, agriculture, natural resources, and human sciences workforce including the future USDA workforce." It will accomplish this by supporting USDA program priorities, including, "providing student scholarship support, meaningful paid internships, fellowships, and job opportunity matching, and also facilitating opportunities to learn the processes and pathways leading to training and employment in the federal sector." In addition, by developing the next generation of a highly skilled workforce for food and agricultural sciences in four targeted fields, this NEXTGEN project will support USDA Strategic Goals 5 and 6.
Project Methods
The project will build on and scale-up pathways in four high-skill agricultural associate and baccalaureate degree programs leading to high growth occupations in which Latinx students and women are severely underrepresented. The project will feature formal instruction, experiential learning, and extensive high school outreach and engagement. Students will be recruited through the partner community colleges for the first two years of instruction and then can transfer to one of the four-year universities to complete their degree. The program will be designed to facilitate multiple on and off ramps for students to acquire needed skills, complete certificates or degrees, and transfer to a four-year program. This flexibility will enable the partners to meet specific student needs. The project will increase enrollment, improve retention and transfer rates, and increase degree-completion and completion velocity for participating students. Long-term, the project will contribute to workforce equity in the targeted occupations.To ensure the effectiveness of the project, an evaluator external to the project will consult on the establishment of baselines and benchmarks (pathway enrollments, student demographics, current retention, transfer, job-out, and graduation rates); the designation of variables against which to measure participant success (measures against baseline metrics); the finalization of data collection methods (processes, protocols, timelines, digital and print); and other key factors. The evaluator will prepare annual (formative) and five-year summative reports in addition to USDA required reporting. The evaluation team will regularly review activities during project implementation, keep the project on task and on track, and recommend changes/adjustments as the project proceeds. Project staff will prepare a final report documenting the achievement of objectives based on the evaluator's findings. Significant amounts of quantitative and qualitative performance feedback data will be generated by this evaluation plan. The project's objective performance measures will include:• Quantitative performance feedback data: outreach, recruitment, and enrollment data; student participation data (work-based learning, career development, leadership development, student support programs, other activities); in-take data; service allocation; survey data; program access and usage data; student persistence/retention data; internship placement data; scholarship awards and disbursement; student academic performance data; student transfer and job-out data; and student completion/graduation data. Quantitative data will also include student goal achievement, industry and USDA employment placement rates for graduates. This data will track students placed in jobs corresponding to the four targeted pathways: Agriculture Plant Science; Agriculture Food Safety; Agriculture Business Management; and Industrial Automation/ Mechatronics. All partners will generate, track, and report quantitative performance data.• Qualitative performance feedback: all participants, students, faculty, project staff, partners, and others will have ongoing opportunities to provide feedback to the program in assessment of progress. Relevant methods may include one-on-one meetings; group meetings; focus groups; survey instruments; self-evaluation and feedback forms, written and online. As mentioned, all formative project data will be regularly reviewed and assessed by the project's evaluation team (with support from the evaluator) who will be able to monitor the project's progress and make adjustments when indicated by performance feedback.Ongoing evaluation will generate evidence as to the effectiveness of project activities in improving enrollment, retention, transfer and graduation rates for the target population. This will include the relevance and potential impact on successfully preparing and supporting students and other communities of learners to enter the future food and agricultural workforce.