Center: From Pathways to Workforce: Building Rural Engineering Futures in Nebraska and the Nation

Rural Americans make up nearly one in five of the U.S. population and represent an untapped source of talent for the engineering workforce. With nearly 966,000 engineering jobs currently unfilled and 2.1 million manufacturing jobs projected vacant by 2030, this untapped rural talent pool represents both a national economic necessity and a matter of educational fairness. This project will establish the Nebraska Engineering Rural Opportunities and Outreach for Transformative Scholars (NE ROOTS) Center within the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). As the state's only college of engineering, the College bears responsibility for serving a predominantly rural state, where 85 of 93 counties lie outside the Lincoln–Omaha metropolitan corridor. NE ROOTS Center treats rural identity as a strength that students bring into engineering, including commitment to community, practical resourcefulness, and hands-on problem solving. It will build pathways, partnerships, and evidence-based supports that allow that strength to flourish from high school through college and into the workforce. By creating durable connections among rural Nebraska schools, families, counselors, and the College of Engineering, the Center will make engineering visible, attainable, and compatible with rural students' identities and aspirations. Because these challenges are shared across the many land-grant and rural-serving institutions of the Midwest, Great Plains, and beyond, the models developed in Nebraska will be transferable nationally. This work directly advances the NSF's Division of Engineering Education and Centers goals of strengthening engineering education and developing a capable, well-prepared engineering workforce, by expanding opportunity for a large and capable population, and producing transferable, center-scale models of national value. This project will investigate how rural contexts shape engineering pathway formation, identity, belonging, and professional development across the educational continuum, and will translate those findings into sustained programs. The Center will be grounded in Ecological Systems Theory, which explains how family, school, community, workforce, and cultural systems shape student development, and Rural Cultural Wealth, which reframes rurality as a set of assets aligned with engineering practice. Its work will be organized around three integrated research pillars: Pillar 1 will examine which rural assets and structural barriers shape engineering awareness before college through sustained site visits and semi-structured interviews with principals, counselors, and STEM teachers at remote, distant, and fringe rural high schools. Pillar 2 will follow rural students longitudinally after they arrive at UNL—combining a baseline survey of first-year students in the required introductory engineering course with a multi-year mixed methods study—to determine which experiences convert rural strengths into recognition, belonging, and persistence. Pillar 3 will study how community-engaged work within UNL's Complete Engineer® framework shapes professional formation, supported by a tiered student mini-grant program for rural-focused engineering projects. Cutting across all three pillars, a "See Engineering" platform—featuring the ROOTS Portraits profile series, the residential Farm to Future Engineering Summer Camp, and Interactive Nebraska Engineering Stories—will make engineering fields, people, and pathways visible while creating the partnerships through which the pillars collect data. The Center will partner with rural schools, counselors, student organizations, and workforce partners across Nebraska. Expected contributions include a rare longitudinal, asset-based account of rural engineering identity formation, new methodological integration of ecological and longitudinal approaches within engineering education research, and a transferable model that other rural-serving engineering programs can adapt to attract greater numbers of students from rural areas and strengthen community-responsive workforce development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.