Track 4: Center for Equity in Engineering: Organizational Transformation for Graduate Education

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

University-level administrators, College-level personnel, academic departments, graduate programs, and individual advisors all play important roles in graduate engineering education, but integrating those different influencers to achieve an overarching, coordinated goal is quite challenging. This project will establish a Center for Equity in Engineering focused on organizational transformation for graduate education at Virginia Tech (VT).

Establishing such a center is important because the highly decentralized nature of graduate education in engineering makes integrated reform strategies extremely challenging and fosters inequities throughout the system. Importantly, the Center will reframe broadening participation such that the focus is on changing systems to promote student success rather than trying to “fix” graduate students.

We will focus on organizing, aligning, and integrating many interconnected systems and processes within the system of graduate education (e.g., recruitment, admissions, funding, research, professional development) to promote student success and wellbeing and disrupt systems of oppression across these systems. Aligned with the vision for an ideal STEM graduate education system set forth by the National Academies and the objectives of the National Science Foundation's Broadening Participation in Engineering program, we envision a more equitable and inclusive graduate engineering education where student experiences and outcomes are not predicted by demographic variables or citizenship.

Instead, this Center will work toward facilitating an environment where every graduate student will be provided with opportunities to develop their technical and professional skills, establish their identities as professional engineers, and be included and engaged in the community. This Center will provide a model for other institutions to support a more equitable graduate education enterprise within colleges of engineering.

By meaningfully addressing continual calls for systemic, structural, and sustainable change within graduate education, this Center will make significant intellectual contributions in advancing understanding of how to enact organizational transformation to promote equity in graduate engineering education. Grounded in a collective impact framework and an action research design, this project will be organized around four pillars: 1) revamping policies, 2) aligning structures, 3) shifting culture, and 4) transforming practice.

Through coordinated efforts, the Center will reorient existing decentralized structures, resource flows, and decision processes and foster both bottom-up and top-down change processes. The Center is designed in a way that integrates existing organizational structures, builds infrastructure so that activities in progress can become better coordinated and impactful, includes a variety of mechanisms to ensure successful engagement of stakeholders throughout the organization (i.e., administrators, faculty, and students), and ensures multiple, regular opportunities for critical feedback and evaluation.

The Center leadership team includes every VT College of Engineering administrative position associated with graduate education as well as scholars and leaders in broadening participation and graduate education. Using an Action Research lens, we will document successes and failures, resulting in complementary insights and robust findings that will advance understanding of what promotes and impedes transformative change.

This Center will include efforts that span two VT campuses: a well-established campus in Blacksburg, VA and the new Innovation Campus in Alexandria, VA, which exclusively focuses on graduate engineering education and aspires to produce the most diverse cohorts of graduates in the nation. This design will enable insights on how to pursue organizational change in two distinct contexts: one with existing inertia and one that is void of historical baggage.

In addition to a dissemination strategy that includes a variety of different formats to reach a range of audience needs, the Center will engage multiple working groups of graduate students and faculty who will hopefully become more equity-minded, which also will broaden the impacts of this Center as ideas from their engagement are built into their future work and interactions with colleagues and graduate students.

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.