City College of New York and the University of Texas at El Paso have joined forces in an effort to increase the number of Hispanic faculty in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs at higher education institutions.
The program, which started last week, is called “Collaborative Research: The Hispanic AGEP Alliance for the Environmental Science and Engineering Professoriate,” and is receiving $3.7 million in funding from the National Science Foundation.
“I am very excited about this partnership as CCNY and UTEP are two very strong and influential HSIs,” Dr. Marybeth Gasman, the director of the Penn Center for Minority-Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email response to Diverse. “Both institutions have excellent STEM programs.”
CCNY is based in Harlem and serves a large number of Hispanic students. UTEP, located in El Paso, has about an 80 percent Hispanic student population. At both institutions, the percentage of Hispanic students in relation to the overall student body is not reflected proportionately in the number of Hispanic faculty, which has become a common scenario at many colleges across the nation.
“We both serve a large Hispanic community in each of our institutions,” said Dr. Kyle McDonald in a phone interview, chair of the department for Earth and Atmospheric Science and one of five CCNY faculty members leading the program. UTEP will be led by three experts.
McDonald said the need to create a pipeline is great.
“At City College, we’re one of the most diverse universities in the country. We have a very large minority population here, but when we recruit for new faculty, we really notice that there is a shortage of applicants coming from the Hispanic community,” McDonald told Diverse.
