Graduate Engineering Programs Beef Up Efforts for Women, Minorities

Rice University bioengineering Ph.D. student Sydney Gibson spends her days in the lab, working with tissue and natural biomaterials like collagen and elastin to model vascular processes in lung cancer.

Rice stood out among her grad school possibilities. As an African-American woman, Gibson was impressed by its efforts to draw women and students of color into a still mostly white male domain through social activities, mentoring opportunities and professional development programs. Women now earn more than 30 percent of engineering grad degrees there, compared with the national average of about 23 percent.

Rice is one of the many engineering schools that are ramping up programs to recruit, retain and advance women and other underrepresented students in the face of stubbornly discouraging demographics. Women comprise only 15 percent of the engineering workforce, and black, Hispanic and American Indian workers account for just about 1 in 10.

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Just 24 percent of engineering master's students and 22 percent of doctoral candidates are women, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.

Last year, some 150 engineering deans pledged to craft detailed plans to boost recruitment and retention of underrepresented students and faculty.

For starters, educators have realized that there's a benefit in moving away from the traditional sink-or-swim mentality and instead finding ways to better engage and support all students. That has meant fewer lectures and more emphasis on bringing engineering principles to life through real-world problem-solving and community service.

An opportunity to tackle real work with a public service component "goes a long way" in keeping students, particularly women, committed to the program, says Karen Horting, executive director and CEO of the Society of Women Engineers.

Some of the evidence is at the undergraduate level: About 70 percent of the students who participate in Purdue University--West Lafayette's Engineering Projects in Community Service program report that it increased their motivation to continue studying engineering. Roughly two-fifths are women.

Disciplines like environmental and biomedical engineering, where projects might involve pressing societal issues like climate change or cancer treatment, enroll much more balanced numbers of women and men at the graduate level than other fields do.

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A number of schools are also embracing entrepreneurship as a way to foster teamwork and make theory meaningful and concrete. Some programs have established innovation centers where future engineers and business students, say, can collaborate on carrying ideas from concept to market. And many programs have introduced classes on intellectual property and finance.

Beyond experiential learning, many schools are courting women and students of color with scholarships and fellowships. More than 100 universities are members of the National GEM Consortium, for example, which awards approximately 125 fellowships to those pursuing grad degrees in science and engineering. The fellowships provide full tuition plus a stipend, and include internships at one of about three dozen sponsoring employers such as Intel, Corning, Northrop Grumman and several national labs.

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Because work at the graduate level is so research-intensive and individual, finding a community and a mentor or two on campus can make a big difference in a student's satisfaction level, says Adrienne Minerick, associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Engineering at Michigan Technological University and chair of ASEE's diversity committee.

A number of institutions have established full-fledged diversity centers as vehicles. Georgia Institute of Technology's center, in addition to offering mentoring and enrichment programs, puts on a summer engineering institute for underrepresented high school students that relies on grad students as chaperones and mentors.

Often, this type of engagement reaffirms the older students' interest in engineering and is thus "mutually beneficial," says Dean Gary May. Georgia Tech's longstanding relationship with two historically black colleges in Atlanta, Morehouse and Spelman, has created something of a pipeline for African-American students interested in a graduate degree in engineering.

Universities are also putting a premium on recruiting more women and minority faculty members, so valuable as role models. Women represent only 15.2 percent of tenure-track faculty members in engineering, with African-American and Hispanic professors accounting for just 2.5 and 3.9 percent, respectively.

Doctoral students considering a career in academia should focus a job search on schools where faculty members mentor junior faculty and where women and minority professors are offered training on promotion and tenure, for example, advises Sonya T. Smith, who teaches mechanical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and has led a program there on diversifying STEM faculty.

The idea is to find "a climate conducive to your being successful," she says.

This story is excerpted from the U.S. News "Best Graduate Schools 2017" guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.