Understanding and Supporting
the Whole Student

The Need

Low-income students pursuing STEM degrees often navigate complex and overlapping challenges related to housing, health, employment, and access to public benefits—factors that are frequently invisible to colleges and universities. While STEM degrees can unlock pathways to stable, well-paying careers, many promising students never enter STEM programs or leave before graduating due to unmet basic needs, fragmented support systems, and policies that unintentionally create barriers.

Higher education institutions and faculty typically lack access to the comprehensive data needed to understand these realities. As a result, opportunities to blend and braid educational funding with housing, health, and human services—and to enhance the effectiveness of S-STEM scholarships—are often missed.

S-STEM Hub Role

The Understanding and Supporting the Whole Student NSF S-STEM-NET Hub will create a holistic, data-informed understanding of the “whole student,” illuminating how cross-sector systems can work together to improve access, persistence, and completion for low-income STEM students. Over five years (April 2024 to March 2029), Education Northwest is partnering with Washington state to provide new and actionable information about how publicly funded housing, health, and human services programming can address students’ needs and model how other states can think about using data to improve STEM success for low-income students.

Stay Informed

The Understanding and Supporting the Whole Student NSF S-STEM-NET Hub is in the process of conducting research and generating findings. Subscribe to Education Northwest’s newsletter and select postsecondary as a topic of interest to receive alerts about new releases from the Hub, as well as other postsecondary projects and insights.