May 2

A Closer Look at Minorities in Engineering

In confronting the “gathering storm” of declining competitiveness in the global marketplace, policy makers and business leaders often point to the importance of foreign students and international education in boosting both research and the American work force. A new report released on Thursday argues instead that the solution lies at home, “untapped,” waiting for the nation to wake up to the “quiet crisis” of minority underrepresentation in engineering-related fields.

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“We find ourselves at this moment in history with the number of engineering graduates at one of its lowest levels of the past 20 years, and yet a time when the demand for young people prepared to work in America’s high-technology industries has never been higher,” wrote John Brooks Slaughter, president and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which sponsored the report through a grant from the Motorola Foundation.

The report, whose title, “Confronting the ‘New’ American Dilemma,” refers to a landmark 1944 study on race relations by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, argues that the mismatch been the demands of science and engineering fields and the graduates produced by American colleges and universities must be addressed by boosting the number of underrepresented minorities pursuing those degrees.

While the percentage and number of such minorities (defined as African Americans, Latinos/as and American Indians/Alaska Natives) earning degrees in science, technology, mathematics and engineering — or STEM — fields has generally increased over the years, the report notes the daunting obstacles that confront policy makers and educators seeking to increase the diversity of graduate students, professors and scientists in private industry who have made it through the pipeline. According to NACME, only a fraction of underrepresented minorities graduate high school “eligible” to seriously pursue engineering at the college level, a reality the report dubs “the 4 percent problem.”

In 2002, according to the report, 28,000 out of about 690,000 minority students who graduated from high school that year had taken enough required math and science courses to qualify them for a college program in engineering. And of that pool, only 17,000 enrolled in engineering programs as freshmen, compared with 107,000 first-year students at such institutions. “That same year,” the report states, “4,136 Latinos, 2,982 African Americans, and 308 American Indians received baccalaureate degrees in engineering out of a total of 60,639 minority graduates” — just over 12 percent combined out of the total minority graduation pool, including Asian Americans and other groups.

The report itself is part of a broader campaign by the engineering association to promote wide-ranging policy reforms in education, from K-12 to graduate school. The organization envisions a broad-based partnership between government, business and education leaders to expand access, boost funding and support diversity programs for underrepresented minorities.

Among the report’s “calls to action,” for example, are strengthening STEM education early on in school and improving guidance counselors’ “knowledge of STEM careers and college programs and have them send the message to students that STEM careers pay in terms of salary, prestige, and challenge.” It also targets financial aid and affirmative action programs, and calls for “policies to totally transform the education system to emphasize active, hands-on, project-based learning rather than lecture and rote memorization.”

That might be a reference to the educational systems of some Asian countries that send students to American colleges and graduate programs in STEM fields. At a panel announcing the report’s release on Capitol Hill on Thursday, several participants seemed to pit the success of underrepresented minorities against that of foreign students studying at American colleges, with the implicit suggestion that lawmakers should focus instead on the latent potential of African American, Latino and Native American students. “I think it’s a smokescreen,” said Lisa M. Frehill, the executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, which conducted the research for the report, referring to the willingness of colleges to accept foreign students as compared to the educational attainment of underrepresented minorities.

Most of the data come from various government agencies, including the Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics. To take a 2005 snapshot illustrating the dilemmas confronting educators, the report provides the exact number of minority graduates at each degree level. To African-American females, there were 1,074 engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded that year, compared with 2,111 for males. Females were awarded 282 master’s degrees in engineering compared to 592 for males, while 26 black females earned Ph.D.s in engineering, compared with 74 black males.

For Latinos, the numbers are similar: 1,155 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women and 3,459 to men; 315 master’s degrees to women and 837 to men; at the doctoral level, 28 women earned their degrees and 70 men. The numbers for American Indians and Alaska Natives remain in the single digits at the Ph.D. level, with degrees awarded to eight males and a single female. Those numbers are not available in the report for 2006 because of a new policy that withholds some data on minority doctorates for privacy reasons.

Some other statistics uncovered in the report:

The number of engineering degrees as a proportion of all bachelor’s degrees awarded declined from 1995 to 2005 for all ethnic groups except for American Indians and Alaska Natives. For African Americans, that proportion declined to 2.5 percent from 3.3 percent of all degrees, while for Latinos it declined to 4.2 percent — about the level for non-Hispanic whites — from 5.5 percent in 1995.
At the associate degree level, the percentage of engineering degrees earned by African Americans rose to over 10 percent from about 4 percent between 1991 and 2005. That percentage increased from 6 percent to 9 percent over the same period at the bachelor’s degree level.
The top institutions awarding engineering bachelor’s degrees to African Americans are all historically black universities: North Carolina A&T State University, Tennessee State University, Prairie View A&M University, Florida A&M University and Morgan State University.
The gap between white and black educational attainment has narrowed over the years, “but not disappeared,” according to the report. In 2004, 17.6 percent of African Americans and 30.6 percent of non-Hispanic whites held a bachelor’s degree or higher.

So far, the report is not available online, but supplementary materials have been posted at the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology’s Web site.

— Andy Guess

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Comments

Minority textbook authors

One as yet unexplored way to increase the number of minority engineers is to provide as role models textbook authors from minority groups. My organization is interested in comments on this idea. We believe that part of the low interest of minorities in engineering careers is the lack of role models in the textbooks to which they are exposed in secondary and higher education. We are offering workshops in academic and textbook writing, and wish to hear from interested parties. We are a non-profit professional organization of over 1400 members.

Richard T Hull, Executive Director at Text and academic authors association, at 7:50 am EDT on May 2, 2008

Just another lame excuse

I see this a lot: We need more X (in this case, engineers); a particular group is “underrepresented” among X; therefore we should need to take steps, including affirmative action, to increase the numbers of that group among X. But what difference does it make if we increase the numbers of X by adding members of “underrepresented” or “overrepresented” groups? If we need 100 more engineers, who cares what color they are?

If we think that there are talented people out there who are not pursuing a career in some profession because they lack information about it or need more financial support, okay, provide that information or support. But I’m very skeptical about using skin color and national origin to profile such people. My strong suspicion is that it’s just another excuse for racial and ethnic preferences.

Roger Clegg, President and General Counsel at Center for Equal Opportunity, at 9:30 am EDT on May 2, 2008

Minorities in Engineering

As a minority in Engineering, I believe that the barriers are not only lack of preparation from High School, but also political, sociological and RACE related. There is a lack of information on available scholarships (not just minorities, but everybody), free tutoring, free advising, etc. A lack of mentors that come from the same background is definetely a HUGE reason — A recent study from minorities (read it on a sociology study from a graduate student at my institution)shows the aspirations of minorities (women) in middle school are mostly to become a good mother — nothing of getting an education. Contrary to the dreams of teenagers froom India or China whose dream is to become a physician or an engineer!

Karla Mossi, Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, at 11:45 am EDT on May 2, 2008

Language and World View

Mr. Clegg’s use of language is telling: “profile” and “preferences” are not the same as considering a range of variables as criteria for selection. “Underrepresentation” in engineering (and science) is no fiction — it is a statistical reality regardless of the denominator one chooses. Mr. Clegg’s “skepticism” stems from the pretense of a level playing field and a color-blind society. That is naive. America has a ways to go. Until then?

Daryl Chubin, Director at AAAS Capacity Center, at 2:40 pm EDT on May 2, 2008

Answer to “Language and World View”

Re Mr. Chubin’s post: (1) The fact that a discriminator considers factors other than race does not mean that profiling and preference are not occurring, too. If the shoe were on the other foot, and an African American were stopped by the police or denied a scholarship in part, but not exclusively, because of race, would Mr. Chubin be so accepting? (2) I put “underrepresentation” in quotes, not because I believe it to be fictional, but because the word in this context is misleading, as explained here: http://article.nationalreview.com...ZGViNTZiM2ZhNWE0ZDUwMzJjYmZjMWQzZjI= (3) I don’t pretend that the playing field is level, but people of all colors face disadvantages and so help should not hinge on race; likewise, a colorblind society does not exist, but it is best advanced by prohibiting racial discrimination, not by institutionalizing it. The Supreme Court, by the way, has rejected attempts to justify racial preferences by general assertions of societal discrimination.

Roger Clegg, President and General Counsel at Center for Equal Opportunity, at 3:55 pm EDT on May 2, 2008

The question of what is happening with the interest and preparation of minorities as impacting their participation as students in STEM programs cannot be answered without an historical view of past practice in K-12 and higher education. Historically in predominantly African American K-12 environments, African American teachers and counselors were very pragmatic in the advice that students received. If you could afford — were going to college, you majored in education, education and education. As the professional opportunities for minorities expanded, it was what ever your interest, take education courses so that you would have something to fall back on just in case your interest did not support you. Underscoring the reality of a student’s interest was the question of who could afford to attend college? If your interest was in science and/or mathematics and you attempted to pursue your interest at a predominately white institution of higher learning, the support(mentoring) was not in place. In fact, institutions (predominantly white)during this time provided many, many strategies to discourage the interest in mathematics and science by minorities (including women_). Some negative scenarios and realities, when it comes to educational processes and support, have not changed. Overcoming, the subliminal suggestions that minority children (including girls) as students have heard and have been exposed to for decades, is going to take decades to repair. I: attended a predominately white high school; placed first in my state’s science competition open to all high school juniors and seniors; Was told by my high school counselor that I didn’t need science courses because I was going to be a maid; Attended a predominately white public university in my state(against the advice of my grandmother and uncle who had attended predominately black universities)majoring in pre-medicine. My experiences as a student, referencing mentoring/student support, faculty reactions to me as a science major, were horrible. It is one that I relate as often as possible to my undergrad institution with the hope that things have changed or will change basically because my experience was not unique to me as an African American student. My saving grace, as a student, was the fact that my parents and relatives had experienced higher education—in my family it was not if you go to college but when and where. How do we expect minorities to nagivate the system, whatever their interest, at 17-18 years of age when the K-12 system is not encouraging and higher education has only been supportive of the A/B high school graduate—that person that everyone is seeking because of their grades and minority status? The B/C student has been ignored and this is a pool that really needs to be tapped as referencing STEM and other professional interests. There are too many personal stories of persons who found themselves academically in college and those persons who were average in college and “found themselves after graduation". Accordingly, the fact that many of these students might be the first in their family to go to college really underscores the void in their understanding of higher education processes and procedures along with their idea of “what they want to be when they grow up". While we’ve come a long way, my personal story of the 60s/70s is the story of thousands of minority students attending predominately white institutions today. The very overt-publicized message of welcome-pursue your interest here- is erased by the reality of the subliminal message-we really don’t want you. It is necessary to note that the support needed might cover many areas including but not limited to academics. It might include connection with/intoduction to other minority students and minority faculty members, living areas, resturants, beauty/barber shops, etc.Institutions that are really committed to serving all populations need to visit historical black universities in order to ascertain what these universities are providing to students that supports and sustains them to graduation. It is the environment.

Donna Moore Ramsey, at 6:10 pm EDT on May 2, 2008

Engineering and science are not the same

I’m a former engineer, retraining for a job in a science field. Engineering requires a different mindset from science. The “ideal” engineer is a superb problem solver, whose job is to find the best solution to a particular problem. ("Best” is defined by the particular discipline and the market for the entity being engineered.)

Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to find potentially solvable problems. In research, we chip away at large, currently unsolvable problems by considering smaller problems on the periphery, and looking for those that we can reasonably tackle. Those of us who find careers in non-research fields look for ways of teasing out relevant data to understand the problem confronting us. We each have a toolkit of solutions to small problems, and our skills lie in asking the questions that let us correctly associate our problems with our tools, and identify situations where we need new tools.

An engineer searches for solutions that meet his/her needs; a scientist searches for problem statements that meet his/her needs. We think differently.

Consequently, I believe that any significant effort to interest more underrepresented minorities in scientific fields will probably have a different focus than a similar effort to interest the same people in a scientific field. STEM is too broad a category.

Karen, at 7:05 am EDT on May 3, 2008

Response to “Lame Excuse”

While I do agree that scientific preparation and awareness of careers in STEM fields needs to be increased throughout all pre-college students independent of race or culture, we cannot ignore the simple fact that Black, Latino/a, and Native Americans are woefully underrepresented at all levels (students, professional, educators, etc.). I attended an HBCU for undergrad and a Research I school for graduate education, and comparing the Black students between the two types of campuses, I came to this conclusion. The HBCUs do a much better job and increasing the self-esteem and self-confidence of the students. The HBCU students seemed better prepared to express their own opinions and pursue their own ideas. While the students at the Research I school have more resources made available to them, the students at the HBCU seem to grow and mature personally at a faster rate. As an engineering professor at a Research I private institution, I can tell you that the minority students do feel there is a lack of support from the college and the university. So while you comment is legitimate, it does ignore and glaring need, which if filled while increasing the awareness of all students to STEM fields, increases America’s chance to deal with the lack of Americans pursuing careers in these areas.

Tyrone Porter, Assistant Professor at Boston University, at 10:50 am EDT on May 4, 2008

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