Salina ? Administrators at Kansas State University’s Salina campus plan to use a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to attract and graduate more students in engineering technology.

The school secured the five-year grant by designing a program dubbed ELITE – Enhancing Lives through Technology and Engineering – to seek out and provide scholarships for students in “traditionally underrepresented” groups, said John DeLeon, head of the engineering technology department at the Salina campus.

Those groups would include those from low-income families, minorities, first-generation college students and students from rural areas.

Besides providing scholarships, the grant will provide funding for recruiting, retaining and mentoring students in the program, ensuring they graduate and placing them in the work force.

“The premise of the federal government is we need more graduates in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines,” DeLeon said. “We’ll work with high schools and community colleges to provide a seamless transition from their programs to ours.”

DeLeon said Kansas State faculty first found out about the National Science Foundation’s request for proposals early in the fall of 2005. They then set about designing the program.

“It involved many divisions of the campus – luckily, everything jelled,” DeLeon said.

Out of the 370 schools that applied for the grants, just 100 received them.

The scholarships will be for a maximum of $5,000 a semester a student, which would mean 20 to 25 students. But DeLeon said plans are to “stretch that to enhance the number of ELITE scholars” by giving less than the maximum in some cases.

The first scholarships are expected to be given in the fall of 2007, for students majoring in construction engineering technology, electronics and computer engineering technology, computer systems technology, and mechanical engineering technology.