Year of Action on Diversity
A Way Up for Low-Income Students
Two-year and four-year colleges should collaborate on a non-abandonment strategy.
By Donna Riley
Engineering promises access to white-collar jobs through a four-year professional degree. In reality, low-income and first-generation college (LIFG) students seeking to enter the profession face many obstacles that their wealthier counterparts do not.
Many low-income high schools lack access to a full set of STEM courses. According to the Department of Education, only half of high schools nationwide offer calculus, and 63 percent offer physics. These disparities disproportionately affect under-represented minorities; just 57 percent of African-American students have access to the full range of high school STEM courses, compared with 81 percent of Asians. The result: Students from low-income households are under-represented in college, and those who do enroll are far more likely to attend two-year colleges than high-income students. If engineering is to fulfill its promise of accessibility to LIFG students, it must empower two-year schools to lead the way.
Two-Year Colleges
Socioeconomic disparities affect study skills and ability to navigate one’s education. Julie Martin’s NSF CAREER study of over 1,400 first-generation engineering undergraduates revealed that LIFG students rely primarily on relationships with faculty and staff for their pathways into engineering, pointing to the importance of providing LIFG students with “resource-rich” (relationally if not monetarily) environments.
Lisa McLoughlin notes that two-year colleges are resource-rich, focusing on student learning and advising adapted to diverse needs. Despite the continuing pressure to track students into vocational programs, two-year schools can play a strong role in transferring engineering students to four-year institutions – an important pathway for LIFG, minority, veteran, and returning students.
Tribal Communities
A five-year project led by Oglala Lakota College (OLC) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota demonstrates a model two-to-four-year pathway.
OSSPEEC, a partnership with South Dakota Mines and South Dakota State, is one of four Pre-Engineering Education Collaboratives (PEEC) jointly funded by the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program and the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. In just five years, these collaboratives built critical infrastructure for pre-engineering programs, enabling tribal college students to obtain engineering bachelor’s degrees through transfer to four-year institutions. The mainstream institutions were transformed to address the specific needs of tribal college graduates, often far away from family support networks.
The Pine Ridge Reservation’s poverty statistics are staggering: dead last in per capita income; 70 percent unemployment; high school graduation rates under 10 percent; 1 hour a week of high school science, delivered via a NASA outreach program. These are numbers engineers are trained to view as infeasible.
OLC’s approach with OSSPEEC redefines constructivist experiential education in the Lakota context. Reservation-defined, community-based projects address real needs such as housing, food insecurity, and environmental justice, and provide research experiences alongside practical training. Students become certified in solar energy installation while they build low-cost, sustainable housing. This learning model is implemented in keeping with Lakota values, especially the concept of tiospaye, or extended family responsibility. Crucially, OLC practices a principle of non-abandonment: It will not terminate a student’s education, finding resources to support students as long as it takes.
Shift the Balance of Power
OLC graduates succeed in engineering at mainstream partner institutions and beyond: The first OLC alumna ever to receive an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the first Mines student ever to receive a Udall Fellowship were OSSPEEC participants. In a broader sense, OLC transforms students’ lives as non-traditional students build a pathway into engineering from every kind of background and life circumstance. There is no situation from which one can “never” become an engineer.
OSSPEEC’s institutional transformations go far beyond articulation agreements. Change is borne by trust and by a new balance of power in which tribal college and community work together for tribe-defined goals, with mainstream institutions in a supporting role.
How can engineering practice non-abandonment? Four-year institutions must no longer cherry-pick students able to withstand engineering’s “rigors,” which are structurally impossible to meet alongside family responsibilities or multiple jobs. We must make the engineering bachelor’s flexible, family-friendly, and resource-rich. We must shift the balance of power between two- and four-year schools: those who know LIFG students best must be the ones to lead four-year institutions in designing learning experiences, curricula, degree plans, and support structures to see them through to a career in engineering.
ASEE Sterling Olmsted Award winner Donna Riley is a National Science Foundation program director in the Engineering Education and Centers division. Her Revolutionizing Engineering Departments initiative was featured in the November 2014 Prism.
Policy Colloquium Draws 100 Deans
By Shanae Jones
In February, the American Society for Engineering Education’s Engineering Deans Council held its Public Policy Colloquium. About 100 engineering deans from across the country attended the two-day conference to discuss systems engineering in healthcare, fracking, engineering technology and policy, and appropriations. This year’s colloquium kicked off with an opening reception that included a presentation from the National Science Foundation’s Director, France Córdova, which was well received.
The colloquium included presentations by Christine K. Cassel of the National Quality Forum, Jeff Mervis of Science magazine, Tobin Smith of the Association of American Universities, Matt Hourihan of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, Joe Lima of Schlumberger, William Bonvillian of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Danielson from the Department of Energy, and Michael Molnar of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Day one of the colloquium closed with a reception on Capitol Hill at the
Rayburn House Office Building. Attendees heard from Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), an engineer, who spoke of his work with Reps. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and David McKinley (R-W.Va.) to sponsor H.R. 823, a bill created to improve elementary and secondary curricula with STEM education.
The Wednesday session included an update on STEM education legislation from Reps. McKinley and Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.), as well as key staffers from the House and Senate appropriations committees, who provided candid updates on discretionary spending and how it will affect engineering education in 2016. The ASEE Department of Council Affairs would like to thank Reps. Lipinski, McKinley, and Tonko, the colloquium speakers, Kathy Eiler of the University of
California, Irvine, and the Engineering Deans Council for their help in executing a positive Public Policy Colloquium this year.
Shanae Jones is council affairs coordinator at ASEE.
Meet Your Staff
Realizing a Childhood Dream
By Nathan Kahl
ASEE staff and members alike can attest to the steady, cool-headedness of Conferences Manager Wayne Davis, a guy as smooth as the opening clarinet glissando in “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Wayne has worked at ASEE since 2006 and in engineering-focused associations for more than 20 years. While he currently helps with logistics, A/V procurement, and invoicing and other paperwork for various meetings, his real passions come through when he’s on the stage or in the studio, bass in hand. In fact, Wayne recently released “A Childhood Dream,” a multigenre album he produced through his writing, arrangements, and performance. The CD can be purchased or downloaded at http://dabassics.com/store/.
Wayne started playing drums at the age of eight – “after years of begging for a drum set,” he notes – and eventually switched to the bass, an instrument that matches his imposing stature. “At that age I was influenced heavily by ’70s funk . . . and nothing else, to really be honest with you,” he says with a chuckle. “After that it was gospel, jazz, and R&B, and when I circled back to the D.C. area when I was 15, I was influenced by go-go” (a subgenre that originated in the capital). All of these styles are present on the album.
Beyond having the necessary musical chops to pull off an album of his own, there were logistics that kept popping up to bite him. “People not showing up for a studio session, one guy showing up in such a state – if you know what I mean – that we couldn’t get through the session. Then the hard drive that was storing all of the sessions crashed, and of course it hadn’t been backed up. I had to chip in on a $1,000 bill to get the hard drive recovered, and even then we still had to re-record some pieces.” There were pleasant delights, as well. “I know a lot of musicians in this city, and so I was able to identify exactly who I wanted playing what on which piece. I had some awesome musicians where after just hearing an emailed sketch of the song they came in and blew it away on the first take.”
Outside of ASEE, music and family dominate his time, not surprisingly. He has five kids, at least a couple of whom have musical talent. His youngest is said to be a good singer, but, he laments, she’s too shy to sing in front of him. His church community is important to him, as well. In fact, he performs with three choirs at two churches. Besides the bass, he plays the guitar, piano, and a variety of percussion instruments.
So the next time you see one of the bands at the division mixer or closing reception at the Annual Conference, look closely. The guy on the bass may be the same one who was working the exhibit hall floor and answering questions. That was the case at Atlanta’s conference, where you also may have heard Wayne’s daughter Marchella sing the national anthem at the Robot Football Competition.