Report Urges Engineering Schools to Work Harder at Diversity

Although the nation’s engineering schools are not as dominated by white men as they used to be, they still have a long way to go if they hope to reflect the growing diversity of American society, according to a report being released today by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. The nonprofit advocacy group’s report says non-Hispanic white males now account for 57.4 percent of all engineering undergraduates — down substantially from 1972, when they accounted for 90.8 percent of such students, but still greatly disproportionate to their roughly 34-percent share of the population. Black, Hispanic, and Native American students continue to account for less than 12 percent of the people who earn baccalaureate degrees in engineering each year. The nation’s top producers of Hispanic engineers are the public University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the private Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. Together they account for about a fifth of the 4,614 bachelor’s degrees in engineering that American institutions awarded to Hispanic students in 2005. Most of the other institutions with high rankings on that list are public universities in Florida and Texas. Many of the top producers of black engineers are historically black colleges and universities such as North Carolina A&T State University, Tennessee State University, and Prairie View A&M University. About 6 percent of all engineering undergraduates are black, the report says. In an open letter published as part of the report, John Brooks Slaughter, the council’s president, says the growth in minority engineers “has been marginal, neither steady enough nor substantial enough for the representation of minorities to approach parity with their presence in the U.S. population.” Among its recommendations, the report calls on colleges and the government to “fight back against” legal and political challenges to race-conscious admissions and financial-aid policies. It urges colleges to create special programs to ensure that minority students get enough support from peer groups, mentors, and role models to be able to complete their educations. —Peter Schmidt