Project History

The KC Urban Renewal Engineering Fellows Scholarship Program began in Fall 2020.

Kansas City, Missouri, is a large, diverse metropolitan area with a public school system that is currently unaccredited by the state. As a result, its students are plagued by reduced access to college-ready career pathways in any field, especially engineering. Thus, many students suffer from opportunity-based need, which describes students who have not had the opportunity to develop the foundation that will allow them to be successful without additional scaffolding.

This project was proposed to assist these students whose opportunity-based need is exacerbated by the institutional obstacles they face as they matriculate through the secondary-postsecondary STEM pathway. The lynchpin of this process is providing them with the supports they need to successfully complete the second year of their community college program and the first year of their university program through a holistic approach.