A nationally recognized champion for diversity is charting a bold new course for inclusive engineering education—and ASEE.
By Pierre Home-Douglas
After a distinguished 26-year career at Louisiana Tech University’s College of Engineering and Science, including serving as associate dean for undergraduate studies, director of the Office for Women in Science and Engineering, and a nationally recognized authority on gender equity and diversity in the STEM fields, Jenna Carpenter technically “retired.” In reality, she seized an irresistible—if unanticipated—opportunity to create and lead an innovative engineering program from scratch. The goal: broaden the nation’s engineering talent base by ditching “weed-out” traditions and reimagining how to teach students whose poor academic preparation reflects their social circumstances rather than their ingenuity or ability to succeed.
“It was a bit of a crazy thing to do,” acknowledges Carpenter, ASEE’s President, now eight years into her tenure as founding dean and professor of engineering at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. Still, she relished the challenge—which she likens to launching a start-up—of transforming learning for a broad spectrum of undergraduates by instituting evidence-based practices and engaging curricula like those she had investigated and applied with strong results at Louisiana Tech. “I certainly knew after all these years what I wanted to do,” explains Carpenter, whose research focuses on diversity in STEM and innovation in STEM higher education. She also knew what she didn’t want to do: replicate the type of inhospitable learning environment she encountered as one of the few women in her first-year engineering courses, particularly the “weed-out” culture that drove her to switch majors and which she says persists today.
Carpenter’s own persistence, pluck, and resilience trace back to her rural Southern upbringing and the supportive community of adults who nurtured her intellectual curiosity along with her exceptionally keen mind for science and computation. Born in Corsicana, Texas, in 1961, the only child of Depression-era parents, she grew up in Hope, Arkansas, President Clinton’s birthplace, attending the same small-town elementary school and church as Clinton had as a boy. “Math was always one of my favorite subjects from my earliest memories,” recalls Carpenter. That zest was reinforced around third grade, when her father, an agricultural technologist who often worked at home on lab reports in the evenings, purchased one of the first calculators on the market. At the time, she notes, many Americans hadn’t even seen a calculator, let alone owned one.
Unwelcome Mat
Like many high-school students with a knack for numbers, Carpenter was told that because she was “great at math” she should “go into engineering.” She entered Louisiana Tech in 1980 intending to major in biomedical engineering but soon discovered that “it was not a friendly place.” Carpenter earned straight As, “so it wasn’t that I couldn’t make the grades, but I just didn’t like it. Nobody was trying to help you or make you feel like you belonged there.” By contrast, the mathematics department dangled a full-tuition scholarship—a rarity back then and a big incentive to switch for Carpenter, who knew how much her parents were sacrificing to send her to college. “Plus, people in math knew who I was,” she adds. “They were welcoming, they were supportive. From engineering, I got zero.”
The unwelcome mat extended far beyond female engineering students. Carpenter’s future husband, Walter, who was a couple of years ahead of her at Louisiana Tech, remembers a professor in his first engineering class walking in and declaring: “There are too many people in this classroom. Everybody on the left-hand side of the class is going to fail.” Today, Walter is an engineer with International Paper and the mayor of Vienna, Louisiana, the couple’s longtime home, where they raised two children who currently are pursuing graduate degrees.
Fortunately, says Carpenter, the “attitude that most of the students in engineering weren’t smart enough or worthy” has changed somewhat. Not before it rerouted her academic career, however. After earning a BS in mathematics with a statistics-math-engineering minor that included senior-level biomedical engineering courses, Carpenter received a fellowship to Louisiana State University, where she earned her MS and PhD in mathematics. She joined the Louisiana Tech faculty in 1989 and spent six years in the mathematics department before serendipitously being tapped to head one of the the engineering programs in the newly merged College of Engineering and Science shortly after receiving tenure. At various points in the ensuing two decades she led all seven engineering programs, both engineering technology programs, and computer science. Carpenter also became a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the national level, holding leadership positions in ASEE, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Women in Engineering ProActive Network.
“I don’t promote myself as an engineer—I’m not—but I’ve been doing engineering administration for so long I don’t think about it a lot,” says Carpenter of her unconventional background. She credits Louisiana Tech’s “very different administrative model” of “choosing people for leadership potential, not just their expertise”—a model it still embraces.
What has shifted far less, contends Carpenter, is “the weed-out philosophy” that conflates strong academic preparation with engineering ability and remains “very much a part of how we educate students.” The mindset takes for granted that students will arrive with deep math and science knowledge, study and time-management skills, and enriching summer experiences and other advantages that a privileged background bestows—an implicit bias that colors everything from admission policies to course pacing and performance standards. “We expect everyone to walk in the door starting at the same place, and in doing so, we throw away tons of ability,” laments Carpenter. First-generation college goers, students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, and people from rural communities that lack strong schools, she adds, are behind the eight ball from the outset. Her college transition is a living example. Despite having two gifted female math teachers in junior high and high school, other high school math classes left her with knowledge gaps that forced her to learn some key algebra and trigonometry concepts on her own. Calculus wasn’t even an option. That she was ill-prepared in that foundational subject when entering college “had nothing to do with my ability,” stresses Carpenter. “The fact was my high school simply didn’t offer the course.”
As an associate dean, department head, and dean, Carpenter has fought to replace the weed-out culture—and its filters—with a “weave in” mission that deliberately adopts policies proven to help attract, retain, and graduate students from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. (See President’s Letter) As ASEE’s President, she is spearheading a similar initiative to effect deep, bold changes both Society-wide and nationwide.
Pioneering Reforms
At Campbell, Carpenter could literally break new ground. Getting an engineering program up and running from scratch is a mammoth undertaking, and she “led from the front,” says associate engineering professor Lee Rynearson. “We were in the trenches together doing admissions, value statements, curriculum, prerequisites, accreditation—even choosing the paint colors for rooms and what furniture we needed.” Carpenter, he says, “had the experience and background to know what was required” and how all the pieces fit together, “but we all worked our butts off.” If they’d had to sustain that intensity—Rynearson was logging 16-hour days, six days a week—“we’d all be dead.” Still, he marvels, “whatever needed to be done, however it needed to be done, whenever it needed to be done, she was there.”
Efforts to bake equity and inclusiveness into the engineering program’s DNA range from exercises to ensure classmates know each other’s names to bold admissions policies, project-based learning from day 1, and industry internships that connect theory with professional practice. Students get immersed in a supportive environment before classes even begin with a daylong orientation. The lessons are reinforced early in the first semester during an evening event called Engineering Techniques for Success. The five-hour boot camp includes a presentation from the dean on study skills, a panel of students discussing how they adapted to the rigors of engineering school, and two no-phone homework sessions in which upper-level engineering students collect cellphones and keep participants focused on their assignments.
Evidence-based practices have similarly transformed the curriculum. First-year courses, for example, feature team design challenges that integrate math and science while forging real-world skills. One project, for example, involves building a saltwater fish tank, replete with a heater, temperature and salinity sensors, and solenoid valves. Students manufacture a pump on a milling machine and 3D print the impeller. They then test their systems, including the computerized controls they programmed, by balancing salinity and temperature levels after successive injections of hot water, salt, and ice. “It’s a pretty complex project for the middle of the freshman year,” notes Carpenter, adding that “industry often thinks this project is done by juniors.”
Resilience, grit, and a growth mindset are also crucial qualities that Campbell’s program strives to cultivate, hence the emphasis on team projects. “A lot of kids don’t want to fail,” observes Carpenter. “We tell them you need to fail early and often because that’s how you learn. You’re not going to design something perfect the first time. No way.” To reinforce the lesson, faculty “talk about ethics and excellence—not perfection but excellence,” says Carpenter. Another cornerstone is Campbell’s comprehensive student support network, which includes peer mentoring, programs for first-generation students, scholarships for low-income students, and student study groups. “Most other institutions have some similar programs,” says Rynearson, who teaches the first-year engineering design sequence and student-success seminars, “but at Campbell they are pervasive, they are mandatory, and they are inescapable.”
Career development is pervasive as well. Students are coached on how to write a resume and what to wear and say at interviews—including mock interviews conducted with industry. Many do internships with Research Triangle Park’s vibrant businesses and start-ups. “We do everything that we can think of that has evidence behind it,” explains Carpenter.
That includes fostering a sense of community. In the mandatory Engineering 100 class, every student learns the names of their entire cohort. That may seem trivial, but Carpenter points to the 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index showing that having a strong connection to a peer was a key factor in student success. Students are also taught to manage their time and take ownership of their learning.
Math has long been engineering’s gatekeeper—and often an insurmountable barrier for many underprepared students. Mandated by the university administration to have a pathway that all comers could get through in four years, Carpenter and her team reimagined the degree program around three so-called entry points. The first is for students who are ready for precalculus or above. The second is for students who need college algebra, while the third is for those who require even more math preparation. The latter two groups take regular credit courses in engineering while supplementing them with preparatory math courses. “If you come in with the bare minimum, that is a very hard four years, but it can be done,” says Rynearson. Two extra summers of classes should catch most people up with their regular cohort by junior year.
Smashing Stereotypes
Since enrolling its first students in 2016, Campbell’s fledgling engineering program has graduated three very diverse classes—women made up 31 percent of this past spring’s degree recipients—and garnered national attention for its innovative approaches. 2020 milestones include competing for the first time in NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge, celebrating the charter class’s 33 newly minted mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering bachelor’s degree earners, and being named one of the nation’s most inclusive engineering schools by ASEE.
Weaving students into engineering ultimately involves changing an institution’s infrastructure, and Carpenter affirms that her school not only admits but also graduates individuals from underrepresented groups—including those “who might not succeed anywhere else.” Tyler Murphy, 22, is one of them. The college senior lacked high school algebra and had been turned down by two other universities when he arrived at Campbell. He figures he never would have studied mechanical engineering had he not heard about the school.
Murphy says his success is partly due to Carpenter, his precalculus instructor. “She insisted on mandatory office hours where you would go over your tests and have a one-on-one with her to find out how you did and how you can improve. That helped a lot,” he says. “She’s really good at what she does.” This past summer, Murphy spent a 12-week internship at Boeing in Charleston, South Carolina, working on carbon-fiber reinforced plastics. His boss toured Carpenter around the facility and even arranged a meeting with one of their vice presidents; both said they were impressed with the quality of work that Murphy performed.
Given the nation’s declining high school enrollments and changing demographics, engineering schools everywhere could learn from Campbell’s example. As ASEE’s President, Carpenter is blazing the way forward, convening experts, disseminating effective practices, and using her bully pulpit to confront bias and alter attitudes not just in academe but also within the public at large. “The soccer coach, the next-door neighbor, Aunt Mary, and the checkout person at Walmart—they all perpetuate these stereotypes about who can do engineering and what engineers do, without meaning to,” she says. “That is a huge challenge.” P–12 education needs to shift gears, too. “[Currently] if you don’t start on the advanced math path at sixth or seventh grade, then you don’t get far enough to get into engineering,” says Carpenter, noting the folly of adhering to a pathway determined by a sixth grader’s “decision that impacts the rest of their lives.”
The future of engineering, contends Carpenter, will depend on how well the academic community can shift systems and shatter stereotypes. “Do the math,” she says. “If we’re going to keep educating engineers, if we’re going to have jobs and meet workforce needs, we’ll have to figure out how to attract and educate all the talent that’s out there—not just the talent that arrives well-prepared. We need to weave students in; not weed them out.” That adds up to an engineering grand challenge that Carpenter already has proved eager and able to tackle, even if it means flunking retirement.
Pierre Home-Douglas is a freelance writer based in Montréal and frequent Prism contributor.
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