Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

More than 100 Bold New STEM Commitments as Part of the White House College Opportunity Day of Action

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during the White House College Opportunity Day of Action summit at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., Dec. 4, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

Maintaining the momentum from the January College Opportunity Summit, OSTP organized regional convenings on improving STEM undergraduate learning on college campuses this past fall, to learn the progress being made by institutions and organizations who made January commitments and to broaden the coalition for yesterday’s Day of Action. 

Among the 110 new initiatives and actions to improve STEM college completion being announced yesterday, are efforts to: increase STEM graduation rates at college and universities up to 35% over the next 5 to 10 years—producing thousands of more students that help us reach the Administration’s goal of 1 million additional STEM graduates by 2022, expand mentoring, financial aid, tutoring, and internships for women and minorities pursuing STEM fields, move away from traditional lecture-based courses to more active classrooms that encourage students to solve problems in small groups and hands-on experiments and modeling- methods that both increase student learning and student retention in STEM majors, and make progress on the Administration’s goal to prepare more excellent K-12 teachers with expertise in STEM areas. 

For example:

• California State University Los Angeles, which serves as a gateway to higher education for youth in East Los Angeles where over 95 percent of residents are Hispanic and more than 25 percent live below the poverty line, seeks to increase the number of STEM degrees awarded to underrepresented minorities by 25 percent in the next five years through a summer bridge program and focusing on the first year experience of students in the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology.
• Dallas County Community College District committed to implementing a number of interconnected strategies to identify, recruit, and support more low-income, female, and underrepresented STEM students culminating in an additional 1200 students annually by 2020 with a graduation rate better than 50 percent.
• Florida International University (FIU), a minority serving institution with over 11,000 STEM majors approximately 8,800 of whom are from groups underrepresented in STEM, commits to increasing overall STEM graduate rates by 10%, through providing faculty with the time and funding to receive professional development in evidence-based teaching methods and integrating the culture of evidence-based instruction into faculty assignments, evaluation, tenure, and promotion processes.
• Through its collaborative engineering program initiative with the University of Texas (UT) at Tyler, Houston Community College (HCC) committed to increase the number of engineering college graduates by 200 students annually, particularly those from underrepresented groups).  The increase would reflect a 20% and 15% completion rate, respectively, for HCC and UT Tyler.
• Nebraska Wesleyan University commits to improving second-year retention in STEM fields by 15 percent over the three years by overhauling introductory biology courses to connect students to scientific research earlier in their STEM college career.
• Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) commits to increase STEM degree completion by 15 percent, and to double the number of underrepresented minority students enrolled in a STEM degree program, through offering opportunities for STEM experiential learning, as well as supporting academic departments to implement evidence-based teaching practices in introductory courses, including course-based research experiences.
• Over the coming year, the Helmsley Charitable Trust expects to commit an additional $10 million in funds to support nationally scalable efforts, particularly among community colleges and institutions that serve less resourced communities of students to support STEM student success.
• Eight individual initiatives or institutions – including the State University of New York (SUNY), Uteach in partnership with the National Math and Science Initiative, CalTeach in the California State University System, Southern Connecticut State University, Westminster College, Stetson University, and Temple University – will prepare more than 10,000 excellent K-12 teachers with expertise in STEM fields to inspire the next generation of STEM innovators.  This represents continued progress on the President’s goal to produce an additional 100,000 excellent K-12 STEM teachers over a decade.

The day featured new Administration commitments, including the release of a Dear Colleagues letter from the National Science Foundation (NSF) calling for proposals to pilot innovations for helping students learn the mathematics taught in the first two years of college and to plan and execute workshops in 2015 on using research to improve student success in mathematics in the first two years of college. Programs supporting this work in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources include Improving Undergraduate STEM Education, Advanced Technological Education, Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program, Tribal Colleges and Universities Program, Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers, and Discovery Research K-12.

Improving STEM degree completion was one of four key action areas for the Day of Action which also included, building networks of colleges focused on promoting completion, creating K-16 partnerships around college readiness, and investing in high school counselors as part of the First Lady’s Reach Higher initiative.

Learn More:

• Read the President’s full remarks
• Read the First Lady’s full remarks
• Learn more about the First Lady’s Reach Higher initiative
• Learn more about the College Opportunity Day of Action and read about all the commitments

Celebrating National Entrepreneurship Month

In this year’s Presidential Proclamation of November as National Entrepreneurship Month, President Obama called on all Americans to “continue our work to ensure America remains home to the best minds and the most innovative businesses on earth.”

Here are some highlights of how we celebrated entrepreneurship over the past month here at the White House:

The President congratulated three student winners of the National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge in the Oval Office. The students – including 13-year-old grand prize winner Lily DeBell – were chosen from a field of over 20,000 contestants. In addition, the President announced new efforts to significantly enhance immigration options for foreign entrepreneurs who seek to start and grow companies here in the United States as part of his executive actions to fix our broken immigration system.

The First Lady appeared on a special episode of ABC’s Emmy Award-winning show “Shark Tank,” featuring veteran entrepreneurs who continue to serve our country by creating jobs and fueling economic growth. The Administration continues to promote the success of veteran entrepreneurs through enhanced training and access to capital.

Vice President Biden delivered the keynote address at the fifth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Marrakech, Morocco, in which he announced a new commitment by the United States to spark $1 billion in new private investments over the next three years for entrepreneurs, including social entrepreneurs, worldwide. At the summit, Dr. Jill Biden spoke at a signature event for women entrepreneurs, while Secretary Penny Pritzker (Department of Commerce) and Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet (U.S. Small Business Administration) emphasized America’s leadership as the epicenter of invention and innovation – and as a model for other countries.

We highlighted the recent accomplishments of University Innovation Fellows, a growing cohort of student leaders who are on a mission to generate more entrepreneurial activity and collaboration on campuses across the country. We also hosted the 50 winners of the Small Business Administration’s first-ever Growth Accelerator Competition, representing some of the most promising startup accelerators throughout the country. As Administrator Contreras-Sweet explained, “Incubators, or accelerators, create a multi-faceted support structure to help startups quickly launch and commercialize their ideas.” The Growth Accelerator Competition was a great opportunity to showcase how more and more Federal agencies are experimenting with the startup accelerator model to advance national priorities. For example:

• SunShot. The SunShot Incubator Program, run by the Department of Energy (DOE), supports early-stage companies that are helping make solar energy fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources before the end of the decade. SunShot Catalyst is an open innovation challenge that rapidly brings teams from ideation to initial funding. Together, these programs have leveraged $104 million in government funds to attract more than $1.8 billion in private-sector investment for participating companies.
• Health Startup Challenges. The Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, launched by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), invited multidisciplinary teams to develop business plans and start new companies based on unlicensed but promising breast cancer inventions. More recently, NIH launched a Neuro Startup Challenge around brain-related inventions, based on this same startup-driven model for bringing Federally funded research from the lab to the commercial marketplace. Meanwhile, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has launched the Market R&D Pilot Challenge, which aims to bridge technological gaps in health IT by bringing together large healthcare organizations and innovative young companies.
• Furnace. The Department of Defense recently launched the Furnace Technology Transfer Accelerator, an intensive nine-month program designed to incubate new companies that license technologies developed at the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, New York. Furnace provides mentorship, office space and seed funding.
• Innovation Corps. The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, first developed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides entrepreneurship training for Federally funded scientists and engineers, pairing them with business mentors for an intensive curriculum focused on discovering a demand-driven path from their lab work to a marketable product. New pilots have recently been launched by the NIH for biomedical technologies that can detect, diagnose and prevent disease, and by DOE for clean energy innovations developed at the national laboratories.  
• Global Innovation. The Department of State’s Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) initiative empowers young science and technology entrepreneurs in 86 countries to turn their ideas into new ventures that transform their communities. Since its launch in 2011, GIST has engaged with more than 2.8 million innovators and entrepreneurs around the world, providing training to over 4,500 startups that have generated more than $80 million in revenue. At the Global Entrepreneurship Summit this past month, GIST launched a new public-private partnership to deliver on-demand programming, one-on-one mentorship, and access to financing through a comprehensive online platform.

Looking ahead, in the President’s words, we will “reaffirm our commitment to support these entrepreneurs as they develop the products, services, and ideas of tomorrow.” Check out the White House Startup America initiative for updates on how the Administration is working to accelerate entrepreneurship across the country.

Doug Rand is Assistant Director for Entrepreneurship at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.