An Early College Experience for High School Students to Promote Careers in the Transportation Industry

The US Department of Transportation (DOT) established various educational initiatives to support the need for a diverse workforce that is equipped to pursue a career in the transportation industry. This has become labor skillsets need. The objective of this paper is to showcase a successful case example of these initiatives to inform other peer engineering schools in the United States as well as in other countries. This initiative is the National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP), which aimed at providing high school students with a 2-week college experience to learn about transportation-related courses, with the optimum goal of motivating them to study transportation engineering and ultimately join the transportation workforce. The program was implemented in both the summers of 2018 and 2023, under the theme "Modern Design Tools in Transportation Engineering: How to Prepare Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympic Games?" with around 40 students from 20-30 schools across Southern California, participating every year. The paper describes the model CPP implemented to recruit students, develop the multi-modal inter-disciplinary curriculum, and implement and assess the program. In general, the assessment surveys in both years showed the program was well received not only by students but also by parents, CPP faculty, CPP student assistants, guest speakers, sponsors, and field trip hosts. As proven by the pre- and post-knowledge surveys, the program also improved the understanding of the high school students about transportation-related topics, which could ultimately help them in their future career decisions.