Approaching the millennium

Black Collegian, Jan 1994 by Campbell, George Jr

ELIGIBLE TEXT government, and especially in the corporate sector recognized that engineering had an important role to play in these critical social issues. At that time, more than half of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 corporations had an engineering background. Almost two-thirds of all managers in those companies were engineers. Clearly, if people of color were going to achieve upward mobility in the corporate sector, we would have to gain greater access to careers in engineering.

These considerations led to the formation of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), a collaboration among private sector corporations, to conduct research, to identify the specific impediments limiting access to careers in engineering for people of color, and to develop and implement programs to address those impediments.

WHERE ARE WE TODAY?

During the 20 years since NACME was established, real progress has been made. There were more than 5,000 graduates of color in engineering in 1993. That's an order-of-magnitude over the 1971 figure. No other discipline can claim that kind of growth. In the physical sciences, for example, there has actually been a decline.

While NACME cannot take responsibility for all of the growth in engineering, the existence of a centralized organization that collects and analyzes information and trends and that brings resources to bear at critical intervention points on a national level--an organization supported by the highest levels of the corporate community--has made a substantial difference in galvanizing support from all sectors.

The question is, where are we today in the quest for parity? In spite of unprecedented growth, only 7.9 percent of the engineering graduates this year were African-American, Hispanic, or American Indian, and we're now 28 percent of the college-age population. What can we do to accelerate our progress? The greatest short-term opportunity we have to increase participation in the engineering profession is to keep students in the pipeline who have already demonstrated the interest, motivation, commitment, and academic performance necessary to succeed.

ATTRITION REMAINS UNACCEPTABLY HIGH

Unfortunately, nationally, we're not doing a very good job. Two-thirds of all students of color who enroll in engineering drop out before they get their engineering degrees. That's twice the attrition rate of their white peers. While we produced 40,000 engineers of color, over the past decade almost 80,000 students dropped out, and half of those left college altogether. This is a tremendous loss in human resources to the nation.

Why do we have this attrition problem? Why is it that university programs developed over the past ten years to combat it (although some have had positive impact) have been collectively ineffective nationally? Many are based on incorrect assumptions, and focus on "fixing" the student. The conventional wisdom is that typically students of color are inadequately prepared for the rigors of the engineering curriculum; they are less motivated than their peers; they've had little informal exposure to science and engineering; and their high school courses are, on average, substandard. There is also a pervasive belief that these students, especially African Americans, are less capable in mathematics and science. None of this is true. In fact, engineering has been enormously successful in attracting top-performing high school students of color--students who are typically in the top 15 percent of their class, who have taken chemistry, physics, and calculus and who have SAT scores that match their white peers'.

COST OF HIGHER EDUCATION REDUCES ACCESS

The number one reason why students of color drop out of engineering is that they lack the financial resources to continue. Compare the spiraling cost of higher education with the cost of health care which rose 117 percent during the 1980s. Over the same period, the cost of attending a private university increased an average of 146 percent, and the cost of attending a public institution grew 109 percent. Average income expanded only 73 percent. Higher education looms as an impending crisis at least equal to that in health care.

In addition to spiraling costs, which affect everyone, policy changes in the administration of financial aid exacerbate the problem for the poorest segment of the population, where students of color are disproportionately represented. In 1975, 80 percent of all financial aid available was in the form of scholarships or grants. Today loans are the dominant form of aid from the government and other sources combined. Since poor families are far less inclined than more affluent families to borrow, particularly for higher education, the net effect is reduced access for poor students.

A more insidious trend is that universities, burdened by their own financial difficulties, are using financial aid not as a means of increasing access for poor students, but as a tool to lure affluent students who might otherwise be inclined to attend another institution. This works as follows: Suppose a university that costs $20,000 per year has a $5,000 scholarship to award. The grant could go to a poor student, who would then need additional funds from some other source, or the grant could go to a student whose parents could pay the difference in cash. The latter strategy yields a higher net tuition revenue for the school. So a large fraction of scholarship aid is shifting toward more affluent students, again reducing access for the poor. This trend is already having a profound impact on national enrollment.