One of the nation’s best known minority-focused business education outreach programs is leveraging nearly three decades of experience to launch two summer institutes to lure talented high school students into engineering careers.
The Philadelphia-based LEAD (Leadership Education and Development) program, which has traditionally provided intensive learning summer experiences for high school students, is expanding into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education arena with the LEAD Summer Engineering Institute (SEI), three-week residency programs that will be based at Georgia Tech and the University of California at Berkeley this summer.
“We are encouraged by the successes of several programs that target minority students for STEM immersion. The present challenge is to make this movement as far-reaching as possible, and we believe LEAD’s framework is the best means of profoundly influencing the educational and professional choices made by minority students,” says Richard Ramsey, the LEAD president and CEO.
The SEIs will be supported by $1.3 million in donations from Google and DuPont. Each SEI will enroll 30 students who have completed their sophomore year of high school, according to LEAD. Although the SEI has largely targeted underrepresented minorities for participation, the program is open to all students regardless of race or ethnicity.
LEAD’s move into engineering education represents the organization’s response to the national crisis over the struggle by the United States to produce engineering graduates at a competitive rate with the world’s leading economies as well as the ones in emerging nations like China and India. The new program builds upon the foundation of the LEAD Summer Business Institutes (SBIs), which are now located at 10 top business schools, including Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Since 1980, roughly 7,500 academically talented students, most of whom are minority, have studied at the SBIs.
“One thing we’ve learned inside of LEAD is that some 65 percent of our alumni are currently working in the business field, but there’s about 22 percent of them that actually go on to engineering and then the balance to a variety of career professions,” Ramsey says.
