NSF INCLUDES Alliance: Engineering PLUS (Partnerships Launching Underrepresented Students)

The broader impact of this NSF INCLUDES Alliance project is nationwide growth in the number of underrepresented minorities and women obtaining undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees. Specifically, the project aims to achieve a national target of 100,000/30,000 (BS/MS-PhD) degrees for underrepresented minorities and women by 2026 and establish a future growth rate that can substantially close the gap.

Engineering depends on team collaboration, and research shows that diverse groups are typically more effective than homogeneous teams when complex problem solving is a critical goal. The U.S. must therefore educate a diverse engineering workforce to encompass the complex technological challenges faced by society. This NSF INCLUDES project directly addresses this critical challenge.

This Alliance will have a broad reach, expanding to 150 higher education institutions in five major regions of the country. The work of the Alliance is designed to learn what is most effective at broadening participation in engineering education, particularly at the critical transition points for students. Its work will enable wider adoption of best practices through the training of change agents that can work effectively both regionally and nationally.

The proposed project has the overarching goal to achieve transformative, systemic and sustainable change that will dramatically increase the number of underrepresented minorities and women obtaining undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees. The Alliance will leverage the wealth of best practices for broadening participation in engineering that has emerged from research over the last several decades to provide the collaborative infrastructure needed to support sustainability and scale-up of successful strategies.

The intellectual merit of the Alliance mission is tied to the research which is aimed at answering the question: How does regional scaling occur across the Alliance? Three levels of investigation will be pursued; Q1) What role does evidence play in scaling the most promising engagement activities across a given region and the Alliance overall? Q2) How do the social interactions and the resultant networks affect scaling? and Q3) What are the historic and operative frameworks of how gender, race and ethnicity, pathway opportunities and goal attainment are addressed?

The research results will create new knowledge and help others work toward achieving inclusive participation in engineering. This NSF INCLUDES Alliance award is funded by:

- NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (NSF INCLUDES), a comprehensive national initiative to enhance U.S. leadership in discoveries and innovations by focusing on diversity, inclusion and broadening participation in STEM at scale.

- Broadening Participation in Engineering (BPE). - Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP).

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.