Examining the Impact of an Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) Grant at a Four Year University

This study presents a comparative analysis to measure the effect of a special program designed to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) among Hispanic students at a Hispanic Serving Institution in Texas. In this study, it was hypothesized that the special program would deliver positive academic effects for the students that it was designed to help. The study used a matched-group approach to identify two groups of Hispanic students with similar profiles for an equivalent and direct comparison. The first group consists of Hispanic students majoring in STEM areas who participated in the special program. The second group of consists of the same number of Hispanic students, also majoring in STEM areas, but who did not participate in the special program. A total of 380 students were identified, with 190 students for each group from a university in Texas that has a population of 6,500 undergraduate students, of which 2,600 were Hispanics. The academic performance of the two Hispanic groups in the study is measured with the cumulative GPA of the students during the study period spanning from the inception of the program up to the most recent year that the data are available. This period consists of the calendar years 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. The study used the mean difference methodology to compare the academic performance of the two groups in general and in specific demographic subgroups for a cross-sectional analysis. Additionally, repeated measures analysis of variance was used to examine the effects along the time span of the study in a traversal analysis.