Although studies claim increases in underrepresented populations choosing STEM majors, barriers to retention, and higher education degree completion in STEM still exist. This study examined efforts of a prominent technical university to attract and retain urban high school graduates through a tuition scholarship program. We sought to determine the trajectories of recruited urban high school graduates and explored students reasoning behind their choice of STEM majors. Findings revealed unforeseen obstacles prohibiting students from pursuing STEM degrees despite free tuition and other benefits of the diversity recruitment program. Student obstacles included: (i) logistic barriers; (ii) academic resources access; and (iii) social/cultural support. A secondary but related finding was the self-realization of engineering faculty culpability in the attrition they observed. This critical account of race and privilege told by insiders to the engineering discipline speaks directly to the failure of educational institutions to address essential components of the economic and academic segregation which currently exists against a backdrop of reform calls which aim to diversify the engineering workforce. Implications for future research and recruitment efforts are discussed. # 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 9999:XX-XX, 2017 Keywords: at-risk-students; opportunity gaps; critical race theory; engineering education; privilege; STEM major selection; urban education; assessment driven instruction; equity and diversity; ethnography In response to concerns the United States is losing ground in technical and innovation capabilities (National Science Board, 2014), there have been numerous calls to action to strengthen the STEM pipeline by enrolling and graduating more students from university programs in STEM. In 2004 alone, "Thirteen federal civilian agencies spent approximately $2.8 billion . . . to increase the numbers of students in STEM Fields and employees in STEM occupations and to improve related educational programs" (Ashby, 2006, p. ii). By increasing the number of individuals entering STEM fields, the goal of these measures is to support U.S. efforts to ". . . continue to innovate, lead, and create jobs of the future" (NGSS Lead States, 2013, p. 1). With predictions that by 2018 the growth rate of many science and engineering occupations will be faster than average (National Science Board, 2010), failure to strengthen the STEM pipeline could potentially erode the U.S.'s ability to remain competitive in a global economy. Engineering education reform documents continue to call for diversifying the ranks of engineers, yet the complexion of the engineering workforce has remained relatively static in its representation, expanding its non-White male membership from 9% to only 13% in over three decades (Landivar, 2013). As many studies reveal (Brandt, 2008;Brown et al

This study evaluates STEM students' preconceptions regarding Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunications and networking with the goal of understanding the nature of these preconceptions to improve student learning in this discipline. In this study we explain the importance of identifying preconceptions with which students enter our classrooms and illustrate a mechanism successfully used in this identification process. Researchers have explained it incumbent on educators to address preconceptions in order to effectively change student beliefs 1 .Analyzing the causes of these will allow teachers to instruct effectively from the start of the topic rather that lose time by re-teaching the material. As networks grow to handle increasing demands for capacity and QoS, telecommunications professionals are responsible for engineering and managing these networks. A solid understanding of factors that affect QoS is imperative and, as such, telecommunications networking instruction must be properly informed.

Student preconceptions play an important role in education. In the constructivist theory, the students' cognitive process is understood as building new knowledge using existing ideas as a starting point. However, students' preconceptions and intuitions are often false, naïve or incomplete. When aware of this fact, instructors can find these misconceptions early in a course, and devise an educational methodology to address them 19,2 . We aim to identify student preconceptions related to networking and telecommunications engineering technology with the objective of increasing the effectiveness of our teaching methodologies. We hypothesize that to effectively address misconceptions, student culture must be taken into account. In addition, by analyzing student responses to misconception testing, we have taken the first steps in developing a concept inventory for telecommunications and networking.This work augments a previous study on STEM undergraduate students' preconceptions regarding Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunications 13 , by giving the same survey to a larger number of students across different programs and countries and investigating the effects of culture and experience on preconceptions related specifically to QoS.In this study, the survey was given to two new groups of students and the pre-and postinstruction responses were the analyzed. The first group was primarily from India and were studying towards a graduate degree in telecommunications; the second group was primarily from the USA and were taking a networking class as part of their undergraduate degree. The students were asked to respond either "yes" or "no" to multiple questions and then explain the reasoning behind their response. The data from each group was analyzed, the undergraduate data was then compared with data from the previous study, and the undergraduate and graduate data were compared to each other with respect to culture and experience 20 .In addition, a new survey was given to another set of graduate students to study preconceptions related to concepts in telecommunications that were not related to QoS. We used our overall results and analyzed the wording, key phrases and key words in their explanations, to create an initial concept inventory specific to telecommunications.This concept inventory will allow instructors to prepare their instructional material and tune their didactic approaches to meet specific student need -some of which may be related to culture and experience.

is an associate professor in the College of Applied Science and Technology (CAST) in the department of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology since 1990. Previously, he was a Large Business Systems Communications Engineer for NEC America, specializing in large scale deployment of voice and data network switching equipment. He teaches in the Master of Science Telecommunications Engineering Technology program and conducts research in Real Time Audio Collaboration (RTAC) and the feasibility, logistics and implementation of live recording sessions carried and delivered over IP networks, Anomaly Detection for Music developing recommender systems for listeners and consumers and 3-D Audio perception, STEM Education related to preconceptions and concept inventories related to telecommunications. Indelicato holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering (BEEE) from Manhattan College, a Master of Science in Information Systems Engineering (MSISE) from Brooklyn Polytechnic University and is an active member of IEEE, ASEE, and the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

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