Community colleges (CCs) play a crucial role in US higher education and are an important pathway to providing educational opportunities for students from diverse populations. Since over half of CC students are low-income, from underrepresented groups, and/or first-generation, CCs must play a prominent role in broadening participation in engineering to meet workforce needs and to solve societal problems. Unfortunately, despite the educational opportunities provided by CCs, there are significant gaps in the transfer process to university engineering Bachelor's degree programs that impact CC students' identity as engineers, their ability to complete their course of study in two years, and their success in securing employment after graduation. In Nevada, this problem is significant and the transfer process for engineering students needs revolutionary change. Engineering students who transfer from CCs to the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) have low graduation rates due to structural, cultural, and organizational challenges that CC students face that affect their graduation and post-graduation success. The program entitled Engineering Pathway for Access, Community, and Transfer (EPACT), is a partnership among Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) institutions. The EPACT revolution aims to catalyze change in NSHE by removing barriers to academic advancement experienced by CC engineering transfer students. EPACT will create revolutionary change by 1) Serving as a model change project to help other systems of higher education make transformational cultural, structural, and organizational changes in the engineering student transfer process; 2) Using the knowledge gained from EPACT research to address a national need to promote a diverse and well-prepared STEM workforce; 3) Developing student-centered engineering education focused on the professional formation of engineers, 4) Disseminating the lessons learned from the project to promote engineering transfer student success at other systems of higher education 5) Providing information to local, state, and federal partners on the value of programs like EPACT for the growing number of underrepresented groups that encounter barriers to transferring into engineering degree programs.

The EPACT team will use the Foundations for Institutional Transformation (FIT) Model as a guiding change theory to carry out this project. The FIT change model, based on John Kotter's theory, is grounded in five values: equitable structures and outcomes, student-centered institutions, implementation at scale, data-informed decision-making, and system-wide collaboration. The FIT model will guide the EPACT team to address cultural, structural, and organizational barriers to engineering transfer student success and study the impact of policies and procedures on transfer student self-efficacy, engineering identity, and belongingness. EPACT activities will advance knowledge by addressing the following research questions: 1) How effectively can the EPACT vision, overarching goal, objectives, and activities achieve cultural, structural, and organizational change within NSHE?; and 2) How strongly is the implementation of EPACT linked to the broader ecosystem that affects CC and university engineering teaching faculty development and the resulting CC engineering transfer students' educational environment, leading to academic success, and retention in their CCs, transfer to university engineering degree programs, and changes in self-efficacy, engineering identity, and belongingness? Research findings will be disseminated to a wide audience both internally and externally to NSHE. Once the EPACT vision is executed, cultural, structural, and organizational changes made at the NSHE and institutional levels will produce real, quantifiable benefits for CC faculty and students.