This coming fall, thousands of first-year engineering students will converge on over 300 U.S. campuses. Of these, perhaps half will complete their degree in engineering.

On Foundation Coalition (FC) campuses the prospects for new first-year engineering students will be significantly brighter, especially for women and minority students. Students in the FC programs are not only more likely to graduate in engineering but also they will have a firmer grasp of the engineering fundamentals, will be more effective team members, and will be able to make better connections across subject areas.

FC campuses have different names for their versions of the FC program:

• TIDE at the University of Alabama
• IMPULSE at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
• LINKS at the University of Wisconsin

All of these build on a single set of FC core competencies:

• Active and cooperative learning
• Increasing participation of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering
• Student teams in engineering
• Technology-enabled learning
• Continuous improvement through assessment, evaluation, and feedback
• Curriculum integration
• Management of change

Research shows that to increase student retention, especially for women and underrepresented minorities, students must establish more connections:  to each other, to faculty, to industry, to academic material, and to their chosen careers. In order to help students establish more connections, each of the FC programs has established learning communities in which students enroll in common sections of two or more required engineering courses, work in small teams, improve their appreciation of diversity, and interact to a great degree with industry. The FC schools have seen 10% to 25% improvement of retention of first-year students in engineering and, in many cases, even greater improvements in the retention of women and underrepresented minorities.