Relationships Between Engineering Student and Faculty Demographics and Stakeholders Working to Affect Change*

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 2004 by Johnson, Michelle J, Sheppard, Sheri D

Students gaining engineering doctoral degrees who elect to join the U.S. engineering academic sector (four-year colleges and universities) join a total population (26,240) that consists of 8 percent women and 5.9 percent underrepresented minorities (1999 data). This is only 27.2 percent of all doctoral engineers in the U.S. (95,890); this compares to life science doctoral holders where 45.9 percent (2001 data) are employed in academia [18]. Blacks, Hispanics, American Indian/Alaska Native engineering doctoral holders were more likely than White and Asian/Pacific Islanders to work in the engineering academic sector (respectively, 41.2, 38.8, and 44.4 percent, versus 32.1 and 15.6 percent). Similarly, female doctoral holders in engineering were more likely than males to work in the academic sector (30.1 versus 26.9 percent).

C. Stakeholders Involvement along the Engineering Pipeline and Pathways

There are several stakeholders involved in actively changing the participation rates of underrepresented minority and female students in the engineering: engineering societies, engineering advocacy groups, government organizations, and engineering faculty. Our data indicate that these organizations work in various places along the engineering pipeline and pathways to prepare students to successfully navigate major decision points such as those described earlier.

Table 5 summaries the missions of the eight stakeholders considered in this study. Four of the eight stakeholder groups are crossdisciplinary engineering societies and, the other four organizations are advocacy groups consisting of individuals who are in engineering, other technical fields, administrators and/or education researchers concerned with creating access to engineering education. Although not the focus of this paper, it is important to acknowledge the key role played by funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, which act to fund the engineering-related programs sponsored by many of the eight organizations we discuss below.

From our data on stakeholders, we identified the roles that they play along the pipeline. Stakeholder roles included working to increase the numbers of the underrepresented persons in engineering at the student and faculty level, informing and changing policy, implementing and supporting students during their engineering and preengineering studies, and working to demystify engineering for the public (especially for young females and underrepresented minorities students). Based on these roles, stakeholder activities were placed m different stages of the engineering pipeline; Figure 6 illustrates where the eight organizations appear to impact the engineering process for underrepresented students. For example, the GEM organization [29] has many financial programs for graduate students and its mission statement emphasizes increasing the number of underrepresented minority students in engineering. As a result, they were under Levels 1 and 2 of the pipeline illustration shown in Figure 6. Since they also sponsor programs and seminars to inform graduating underrepresented minority doctoral degree holders about the tenure process and to assist them in the transition from student to professor, they were also placed beyond Level 2 in the figure.