Science

The U.S. National Science Foundation recently announced the Graduate 10K+ initiative, which includes $10 million in grants to nine university-based projects designed to lower dropout rates among minorities, women, and low-income students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The initiative is being funded by Intel and General Electric. The new effort, which is part of a broader push by the Obama administration for the private sector to supplement federal activities, is the result of a now-defunct federal task force launched in 2011 to improve U.S. competitiveness. The initiative is supporting a collaborative effort by the University of Washington and Washington State University to provide new students with an extra year of math and other basic courses before they proceed with a more advanced curriculum. It also is supporting a California State University, Monterey Bay (CSU-MB) effort to help students make the transition to a bachelor's degree in computer science. "Part of the problem of attracting students into computer science is that they have no experience with computational thinking and abstraction," says CSU's Sathya Narayanan. "Most of them have never taken a real computer science course."  To read further, please visit http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2013/05/corporations-nsf-team-improve-stem-retention-rates.