Symposium for Engineering School Deans to Increase the Retention of Women and Underrepresented Minority Students

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In an era when leaders from the White House to Silicon Valley tech giants portray engineering as critical to America's competitiveness - and are calling upon universities to graduate a bigger, broader group of engineers - institutions of higher education struggle to align strategies and actions with achievement of these outcomes. The research is quite clear about the value of diversity to innovation and invention. The wellsprings of creativity do not flow from a single tap. Rather, they lie in the different perspectives, backgrounds and talents that individuals bring to a team. However, despite decades of efforts and millions of dollars in federal funding, the needle has barely moved in terms of the percentages of women and underrepresented minority students (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) earning engineering degrees. In 2016, women earned 19.9 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. A decade earlier, the proportion was 19.3 percent. Hispanic students earned 10.7% of engineering degrees. Over the same period, the proportion of engineering bachelor's degrees earned by African Americans fell to 4 percent from 5 percent. Key to increasing the number and percentage of degrees awarded to underrepresented students is to dramatically increase the completion rates of these groups. The National Society of Black Engineers is convening a conference for 100 Deans of ABET-accredited engineering schools for the purpose of sharing research on the most effective institutional interventions, core strategies, and critical concepts in retaining and graduating underrepresented minorities in engineering bachelor's degree programs. The Symposium for Engineering School Deans to Increase the Retention of Women and Underrepresented Minority Students will address barriers to retention by bringing the wealth of research findings that are currently available to the academic leaders of university engineering department, i.e., those who are in the strongest position to move change forward in increasing retention. NSBE compiled a systematic synthesis of research available on successful retention strategies for underrepresented students into a white paper, Paving the Way: Institutional Interventions for Academic Excellence and Success in Engineering (Reid, Ross, & Yates, 2015). The researchers interviewed university administrators with experience in successfully graduating underrepresented minority (URM) students in engineering and reviewed research studies about the interventions. Based on this prodigious body of knowledge, NSBE identified a list of interventions that have proven to facilitate the success of underrepresented students in engineering. The Plenary and breakout sessions will be organized around successful interventions and concepts that are necessary to inform these interventions: 1) Institution or Department Level Interventions: institutional leadership engagement; climate; and faculty development; 2) Core Strategies: summer bridge programs, scholar cohort programs; collaborative learning environments; early alert systems; and facilitated study groups; 3) Critical Concepts: self-efficacy; and identity. Session presenters and keynote speakers will be invited from the universities that have implemented successful programs in the topic areas.