According to a report from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), African-American and Hispanic students earning engineering degrees remain underrepresented despite an increase seen in recent years and a growing demand for workers in the industry.
The APLU’s 2018 “Status Report on Engineering Education: A Snapshot of Diversity in Degrees Conferred in Engineering”, funded by the National Science Foundation, used data from all universities and colleges with engineering programs in the United States during the 2010-2011 and 2015-2016 academic years.
APLU, an organization that aims to strengthen the work of public universities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, found that in 2016, Hispanic students constituted 19 percent of college undergraduates but only 11 percent of all engineering degrees. The gap remained consistent with Black students.
Though the number of engineering degrees at the graduate level increased as a whole for underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, only 6.3 percent earned an engineering master’s degree and 4.9 percent earned an engineering doctorate degree.
The low numbers of engineering degrees are due to access barriers, which begins at the K-12 level.
“If you are familiar with the pathway for those math requirements, they actually start in middle school,” said Dr. Eugene Anderson, vice president of access and success at APLU and the lead author of this report. “If your child is essentially not put on the right track for math starting in seventh grade, they will not reach that advanced level by completion of high school.”
Anderson believes there is a “structural barrier” in the K-12 education level. Many engineering programs require an advanced level of math that often isn’t available at urban and rural poor public schools.
