Identifying Catalysts for Increasing Student Diversity in Engineering in a Predominantly White Institution

This project aims to serve the national interest by building institutional capacity for broadening participation in undergraduate engineering. Colleges of Engineering in predominantly white institutions continue to struggle to recruit, retain and successfully matriculate their non-white students. Using a systems approach, this project aims to identify catalysts that can unify programmatic efforts to produce greater institutional success in broadening participation.

These catalysts can exist throughout an organization, and can take the form of people, knowledge, money, policies, built environments, and other resources. A coherent set of programmatic efforts can lead to greater transformative power and sustainability. The project will generate templates that other colleges of engineering in the United States can use to discover and understand their own capacities and to further their own recruitment, retention and graduation efforts for students from underrepresented groups.

The ultimate aim of the project is to enable the success of a diverse pool of engineering graduates, and to strengthen the diversity of the engineering workforce.

The goals of the project are to generate systemwide capacity change catalysts in a College of Engineering at a predominantly white institution. The project conceptualizes the college as a complex sociotechnical organization with two subsystems at work. The social subsystem consists of people such as students, faculty, staff, and administrators.

The technical subsystem consists of elements that can impact capacity building, including goals, policies, processes, programs, data, technology, and know-how. The project uses semi-structured interviews and ideation focus groups with students, faculty, and staff from admissions, advising, and career services as well as administrative leaders. Results will be used to model the sociotechnical system, to develop system capacity matrices and social focal role networks, and to generate capacity change catalysts.

The project contributes to identifying and understanding, in-depth, the systemwide catalysts in predominantly white engineering colleges that will enable these colleges to improve their capacity to recruit, retain and successfully matriculate underrepresented students. The project also contributes a new sociotechnical systems lens and lays out a template for using the lens to model an educational unit.

The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.