The Impact of Summer Bridge Programs on College Students' STEM Career Aspirations
Abstract
The impact of college STEM summer bridge programs is not well understood. This nationwide study pooled data from 27 colleges and universities involved in the NSF's STEM Talent Expansion Program to model changes in college career aspirations for 2 groups: 383 STEM summer bridge program participants and 15,464 controls. Propensity weighted modeling revealed that college STEM summer bridge programs double the odds that students plan to pursue a STEM career, compared with students without program exposure. We found this to be true across a range of demographics and student background characteristics. Implications for college educators, practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Limited empirical research on summer bridge programs is available, and much of it is descriptive accounts, qualitative results, and literature reviews rather than systematic and quantitative evaluations of bridge program success.
“limited empirical research is available, and much of this research is in the form of highly descriptive accounts, qualitative results, and literature reviews (Sablan, 2014; Kitchen et al., 2018) rather than systematic and quantitative evaluations of bridge program success (Gullatt and Jan, 2003).”
From A Meta-analysis of University STEM Summer Bridge Program Effectiveness (2021) · cites this paper as Kitchen et al., 2018
Cited by
Sorted by citations
A Meta-analysis of University STEM Summer Bridge Program Effectiveness
Bradford, B. C., Beier, M. E., & Oswald, F. L. (2021) · CBE—Life Sciences Education · doi:10.1187/cbe.20-03-0046 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
Methodological Choices When Assessing Summer Bridge Programs in STEM Majors: A Scoping Review
Caballero Díaz, D., Amin, A., Musa, P., & Leung, V. (2026) · Education Sciences · doi:10.3390/educsci16020220
- Authors
- Kitchen, J. A., Sadler, P., & Sonnert, G.
- Venue
- Journal of College Student Development
- Publisher
- Project MUSE
- Published
- 2018
- Volume
- 59
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 698-715
- ISSN
- 0897-5264 (ISSN-L)
- 1543-3382
- OpenAlex
- W2905526619
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 4
- FWCI
- 6.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of college student development (publishedVersion)
- Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Career Development and Diversity
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education and Employability
- Keywords
- summer bridge programs, STEM career aspirations, university students, STEM workforce development, student retention
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
