Addressing Demographic Disparities in Students Choice of Engineering Disciplines (ADDS-CoED)

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One NSF strategic goal is increasing the diversity of engineering as a field, to enhance the profession, increase opportunities for all demographics, and make better use of America’s human resources. However, years of effort have had limited success: women and ethnic minority students remain severely underrepresented, starting with undergraduate engineering programs at universities. Most of the underrepresentation is due to chronic extremely low diversity in a few of the engineering disciplines (aerospace, mechanical, mining, electrical, and computer engineering in particular). In contrast, others (e.g. biomedical and environmental engineering) are roughly at gender parity. Ethnic diversity shows analogous patterns. Preliminary data from the University of Arizona suggest that this is due to female and minority students’ disproportionately low levels of interest in these disciplines. This project will pilot a new approach to increasing diversity in engineering, at the level of individual disciplines where diversity is lacking. We further hypothesize that female and minority interest in mining and aerospace engineering would increase if they were presented with a greater connection to social benefit. Initially, the investigative team will carry out surveys and interviews at the University of Arizona College of Engineering to measure preexisting demographic differences in students’ levels of interest in engineering disciplines. We will test these hypotheses with a mixed-methods intervention study focused on two specific non-diverse disciplines (mining and aerospace engineering) at the University of Arizona. Baseline data (surveys, interviews) will continue to be collected in Year 1. Then, a targeted intervention to two low-diversity majors (aerospace and mining engineering) will examine whether female and Hispanic students’ interest and representation increases when introductory courses and recruitment materials change to emphasize their socially beneficial aspects as well as abstract engineering. Interventions in Year 2 will reorient the introductory mining engineering course, and the recruitment materials given to students for both mining and aerospace engineering, to address more of the socially beneficial aspects of both disciplines. Surveys and interviews with students over the course of the project will evaluate changes in women and minority (mainly Hispanic) students’ interest in mining and aerospace engineering, compared to the non-intervention group (mechanical, electrical, computer engineering). Interventions will remain in place for Years 3-4 of the project while additional data are collected. If successful, this project can point the way to improving diversity in engineering at the level of the specific engineering disciplines where it is most needed.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.