Increasing the number of minorities in CS

By David Bellin and Joseph Monroe

North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T) is developing a model national strategy to increase the number of minority students graduating in computer science, enhance the educational achievements of these students and increase the number of these students who attend graduate school and pursue careers in computer science.

Our approach has three main components:

• Recruiting: attracting outstanding precollege, high school and junior college students to our undergraduate computer science program.
• Mentoring: guiding and graduating all of our students so they are equipped with a firm foundation for further studies.
• Graduate study: ensuring opportunities for capable students to engage in graduate research and studies.

This article focuses on the development of the human infrastructure necessary to increase the stream of minority and female computer scientists rather than on equipment infrastructure.

We have seen three significant benefits from following this model:

1) NC A&T's computer science program is growing in support, thereby increasing the number of underrepresented minorities obtaining undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science.

2) Links with education enrichment programs currently supported by state and federal funds are more effective.

3) Other universities can use this model to increase their production of underrepresented minorities in the discipline.

Historic role

NC A&T has had an enormous national impact on the number of minority engineers and computer scientists that graduate each year. For the past five years, for example, the School of Engineering has been one of the top producers of black engineers in the nation. In addition, a steadily increasing female enrollment (currently 34% and 24% for undergraduate and graduate programs, respectively) solidifies the school's position as a leader in the production of female engineers. Now that the computer science program is housed in the School of Engineering, a major goal is to enhance the program's means for recruiting, retaining, educating and graduating its students.

The department offers a B.S. degree in computer science and, in collaboration with the Department of Electrical Engineering, offers an M.S. in software engineering.

After retaining David Bellin as graduate director, we began offering an M.S. degree in computer science in spring 1994. We plan to begin offering a Ph.D. in computer science by fall 1997, an historic event at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Over the past five years, the Computer Science Department has produced an average of more than 40 underrepresented minority computer science graduates each year at the bachelor's level. Total undergraduate enrollment in this program over the past six years has averaged more than 332 students annually. (See Table 1.)

Current enrollment in the new M.S. program is about 45 full-time and 20 part-time students. The first graduates were expected in December 1994.

The university has acquired a national reputation for conducting quality research programs, and ranks third among the 16 state universities in North Carolina. NC A&T professors actively engaged in R&D projects totaling more than $18 million for the academic year 1991-92 and $22 million for 1992-93. The majority of this funding was attracted by College of Engineering faculty. The National Science Foundation provided a grant for the five academic years ending 1993-94 to establish research projects and a Communications, Signal Processing Expert Systems and ASIC VLSI Lab facility. Annual reviews of this past funding have been uniformly positive, and the project met all goals. This previous project leaves a strong physical infrastructure that we use as a skeleton for building an ongoing infrastructure of human development.

We expect that readers of Computing Research News are well aware of our nation's dismal record of producing minority and female computer scientists. However, the College of Engineering at NC A&T has grown to become one of the top choices for African-American students, more than doubling enrollment in the last four years.

Minority engineers

The student body at NC A&T is representative of the population of minorities pursuing college degrees in the United States. Our students continue to enter computer science in significant numbers (nearly 200 new majors this year). However, too many drop out of the major (over 40% the first year), and far too many of our graduates do not earn grade point averages competitive enough for acceptance into graduate school. Although 80% of our computer science graduates are hired by industry, only a handful of the remaining 20% attend graduate school. The major contributing factors here are not scholastic aptitude. Instead, inadequate preparation upon entering and external conditions during the undergraduate experience do not promote scholastic excellence. Our analysis suggests that these are the major contributing factors:

• Many of our undergraduate computer science majors do not devote adequate time to studying because they work many hours off campus. And 80% of our majors hold part-time jobs unrelated to academic pursuits.
• Most of our majors come from the middle third of their high school classes, rather than the top third as measured by their high school GPAs and SAT scores.
• Most of our majors are not motivated to pursue graduate study because they are not exposed to enough research-oriented activities to develop an interest in research and teaching.

Solution-oriented approach

Although the problems associated with the production of underrepresented minority computer scientists may appear to be overwhelming, they can be solved without invention or discovery. They do, however, require a well-managed approach from recruitment until graduation. The solutions also require a broad perspective of the problems in the context of the total life cycle of student progression through graduation. Accordingly, managing all the components of student progression, instead of focusing on a single aspect, forms the basis of our proposed solution.

We also are concerned that once students are recruited for graduate study, appropriate attention continues to be paid to mentoring, including attention to study and research skills and the students' ability to devote full-time attention to schoolwork. This often is overlooked as a source of loss of minority students from the pipeline into higher degrees in the sciences. The following components should be used to accomplish the proposed goal of increasing the number of computer science graduates: recruitment enhancement, mentoring program enhancement and graduate study.

Recruitment enhancement

Over 80% of our students from the top 10% of their class receive some form of financial aid. With climbing enrollment and a relative decrease in funding available from all sources, it is imperative that this department increases its scholarship funding base to attract and retain outstanding high school graduates as computer science majors. Thus, an essential aspect of the department's effort to enhance its ability to produce high-quality computer science graduates is strengthening its ability to offer competitive scholarship support to outstanding computer science students. Accordingly, funding support is a major element of this component.

We are establishing recruitment links with education enrichment programs currently supported by state and federal funds.

We plan to establish recruitment links with high schools in every county in North Carolina and with all 56 community colleges in the state. If funding is available, we plan to offer scholarships to outstanding students.

Mentorship program

The mentoring program is the central operational component of our approach, and it supports recruiting enhancements. The objective of the mentoring program is to produce qualified, competitive minority candidates for graduate programs in computer science. This will be accomplished by working with minority students from undergraduate recruiting through completion of the B.S. in computer science. We already offer release time to faculty members who serve as mentors.

Each student who receives a scholarship will be guaranteed at least one summer research experience at our institution. Our mentoring program is designed to provide a supportive and nurturing experience to enhance the academic, professional, intellectual and personal development of all computer science majors.

This component of our model allows us encourage students, fuel the desire to succeed, guide students, enhance achievement, assist in making academic and career choices and assist in addressing and solving academic or personal problems that may impede academic progress. Our experience in becoming the largest producer of African-American engineers in the nation has taught us that mentoring is crucial to the success of aspiring engineers from underrepresented groups.

A mentoring program should be coordinated by a faculty member responsible for Total Quality Management. We suggest that programs be organized as follows:

• Each faculty mentor should be responsible for mentoring a subset of the undergraduates and be assisted by two graduate students.
• Each graduate assistant should be a mentor for two undergraduate seniors.
• Each senior should be a peer adviser and a role model for up to 10 undergraduate students.
• All faculty mentors, graduate-student mentors and peer advisers should meet with their mentees each week of the academic year in a non-credit colloquium for mentoring purposes.

A mentoring center should be established and managed by a part-time faculty member coordinator responsible for operating the center, acquiring material, setting up programs and scheduling student activities.

The mentoring center should consist of a workstation network and multimedia-enabled instructor/presenter stations with screen project-display capability. Software should be provided for student tracking. Systems should be provided for self study (in areas such as GRE preparation, math skills enhancement and computer science skills enhancement). Seminars should be conducted throughout the year on subjects such as teacher effectiveness, GRE preparation, the research process, technical writing, presentation skills and literature searches. Network access should be provided for computer science research.

Mentoring process

As students are recruited from the feeder programs and enter the department, they should be assigned to a faculty member, a graduate-student mentor and a peer adviser.

• During the freshmen year, skills development in mathematics and computer applications are emphasized, giving students the tools needed to excel in the program. The freshmen experience culminates with a summer job opportunity at a national research laboratory or industry site where students will be motivated to do research.
• During the sophomore year, presentation skills are emphasized. The summer experience should be an internship.
• During the junior year, project management skills and presentation of papers at conferences are emphasized. The summer experience is research work with a faculty member in an area where the student desires to pursue graduate work.
• During the senior year, technical writing skills are emphasized. Students will develop tutoring skills through the role of peer advisers. If graduating seniors enroll in the M.S. program at NC A&T, the students have the option of continuing to work on research projects with faculty members during the summer.
• Under the supervision of faculty mentors, graduate students will focus on developing skills in teacher effectiveness and mentoring. They will work with peer advisers and undergraduate students, conduct seminars in the mentoring center and assist students in the labs. Peer advisers will develop tutoring skills.

Graduate study

Although the overall number of students graduating with a Ph.D. in computer science has increased dramatically over the past decade, the number of African-Americans and women earning the degree has remained dismally low. The number of African-American Ph.D. recipients accounts for less than 1% of the doctorates granted each year, for an average of 0.6% of the total for the past 20 years. This has occurred at the same time that the number of foreign students earning a Ph.D. in computer science from US universities has increased from 32% in 1981 to 55% in 1991. The total graduate (M.S. and Ph.D.) population of African-Americans in computer science currently is 5%; it is 8% at the undergraduate level. The small progress made at the undergraduate level has not resulted in substantive progress at the graduate level.

Success at the undergraduate level is not sufficient amelioration of the underrepresentation of females and minorities amongst our nation's research scientists. This component of our model ensures that those students with the capability and perseverance to engage in research at the graduate level will do so. The continuation of our mentoring and research activities for undergraduates is an integral part of our M.S. in computer science.

We must address the need for minority participation at the highest levels of academic achievement: through the completion of graduate study at the M.S. and Ph.D. levels. Analysis of NSF data shows that the underrepresentation problem gets worse as students earn higher degrees. This exacerbates the problem universities have in attempting to hire faculty and industry has attempting to diversify the workplace. According to the 1992-93 CRA Taulbee Survey, at the 143 universities in North America that grant computer science Ph.D.s, only 0.69% of the faculty are African-American.

Clearly, the rate of retention and production of minority computer scientists must be improved. The most promising undergraduate students must be encouraged to engage in further study. Our approach will likely have to continue at the graduate level. Graduate scholarships and mentoring (as opposed to advising) are not only appropriate, but necessary.

At the graduate level, research activity is the center of the educational experience. Encouragement, mentoring and funding of research activities and articles are key parts of our plan. The advanced degree component is so critical that the doctoral program of study should be made part of the mission of at least one HBCU in the nation. No HBCU currently offers a doctorate in computer science.

We propose to begin planning for that degree at NC A&T. Such a degree program could, by itself, dramatically increase the supply of minority and female computer scientists in the nation.

David Bellin is director of graduate studies in the Department of Computer Science, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.

Joseph Monroe is chair of the Department of Computer Science, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University.