Last week, the National Science Foundation’s congressionally mandated advisory group on issues of diversity—the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE)—hosted the second of two discussions between committee members and NSF leadership concerning the agency’s proposed Comprehensive Broadening Participation of Undergraduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math or STEM (CBP-US) program.
CEOSE members first heard about CBP-US at their March 2010 meeting during which (then) NSF Director Dr. Arden L. Bement and (now) Acting Director Dr. Cora Marrett presented a plan to eliminate the agency’s stand-alone programs designed for minority-serving campuses (i.e., HBCU-UP and T-CUP) as well as one directed at institutions with significant minority student populations (LSAMP).
In their place, the NSF has proposed a comprehensive, competitive grant model that will force Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) to compete with one another and with predominantly White institutions for the same pot of programmatic funds. At both the March and June meetings, many CEOSE members voiced major concerns over the consolidation plan, rightfully arguing that the move would disadvantage those institutions with the most robust history of serving underrepresented populations.
The plan to consolidate three well-established programs (one of which has undergone a formal evaluation that resulted in positive outcomes for minority students in STEM) is not only problematic in its design; the process by which it was conceptualized negates NSF’s commitment to utilize CEOSE as a forum for advice and guidance.
The plan further disregards hard-fought legislation, via the 2007 America COMPETES Act, authorizing NSF to establish a STEM capacity building program similar to HBCU-UP but for HSIs.
Yet what is most distressing is that the NSF—an agency scientific in its orientation—has presented a plan with little to no empirical basis as to why a consolidated program will serve the nation’s underrepresented students in ways better than what is currently in place.
When the question of evidence was raised on the floor of the most recent CEOSE meeting, NSF leadership pointed to scholarly and think tank literature on effective STEM education practices.
