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Admissions Policies

The workshop’s second session featured four presentations from people who, as session moderator Darryll Pines put it, are “working in the trenches” in the admissions process of schools of engineering. The four speakers were David De Sousa (Texas A&M University), Forouzan Golshani (California State University, Long Beach [CSULB]), Tom Farris (Rutgers University), and Sriram Sundararajan (Iowa State University).

THE TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING ACADEMY PROGRAM

The Texas A&M Engineering Academy program, explained David De Sousa, consists of two years at one of seven partnering community colleges followed by two years at Texas A&M University. Participants in this program are not considered transfer students—they are Texas A&M students from day one and come to the main campus to interact with students and faculty five to six times a year while attending the community college. Spending their first two years at one of the community colleges can save students up to $50,000 in tuition costs.

The program is designed to increase access, affordability, and completion rates for students from underserved communities, and, since the beginning of the program in 2015, Texas A&M has seen an increase of 400 percent in the participation of students from these communities. For the fall 2021 cohort, he reported that 21 percent are women, 6 percent are Black students, 38 percent are Latine students, and 31 percent are first-generation students. Students in the program have ranged in age from 14 to 40, some are in the military or working full time, and 150 students have graduated with their engineering degree so far.

De Sousa explained that the application process involves two steps: admission through one of the partner community colleges and students’ demonstration that they prequalify for admission to Texas A&M University based on math readiness, after which they are provided a link to apply to the university.

Industry partners provide funds to the university to run the program.

ACCESS PLUS SUCCESS: TWO PILLARS FOR PROMOTING DIVERSITY IN ENGINEERING

Not long after Forouzan Golshani became CSULB’s dean of the college of engineering in 2007, he received an email from a Black father asking about his son’s progress after attending the school for three years. A quick check of the young man’s records showed, however, that he had dropped out of school two years earlier. “It was an embarrassing situation that I never wanted to happen again,” said Golshani. The result was the formation of the Engineering Student

Success Center, a one-stop destination for services including advising, tutoring, study areas, professional development workshops, internship assistance, and peer mentoring.

In 2008 CSULB, Long Beach Community College, and the Long Beach Unified School District signed a pact guaranteeing admission to CSULB or the community college for all of the school district’s graduates, with one tuition-free year at the community college. Soon afterward, said Golshani, the university realized that it needed a program to help many of its first-year engineering students who were arriving with good GPAs but were underprepared in math and failing to finish their STEM degrees. The result was the creation of the Beach Engineering Student Success Team to provide supplemental tutoring, scholarships, events, and an emphasis on academic achievement.

This program, said Golshani, was based in part on the idea that if something is designed to serve the average person, it is designed for nobody, because no person is average (Rose 2017). By focusing on individual students and their needs, the program increased the graduation rate for engineering students from historically marginalized groups. For example, 22 of the first cohort of 25 students in this program passed calculus and persisted to graduation.

CSULB is now ranked in the top five US schools for graduating Hispanic engineers and first for Native American engineers. In addition, nearly 30 percent of the most recent cohort are women, which is about 50 percent greater than the ratio of women in the rest of the college of engineering. He noted that one of the first graduates from the program was raised by a single mother who worked in the strawberry fields of central California; the student completed an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and is now pursuing a doctoral degree at Georgia Tech.

Golshani concluded that the key to helping students succeed is about “creating fit, and allowing people to study the way they excel.”

ENGINEERS OF THE FUTURE AT RUTGERS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Rutgers University began as Queen’s College in 1766 and is New Jersey’s public state university. Tom Farris explained that it was “put on land of Indigenous people” and “constructed at that time by enslaved people, and we’ve recently really embraced that history from a scholarly perspective.”

New Jersey is a diverse state—one in six residents is Black and there are more Asian than White residents. Farris noted that the social tumult of the late 1960s produced what is known as the Newark Accords, which in 1969 established the New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund, a commitment by the state’s chancellor of higher education to serve 10 percent of students at the “42 participating institutions of higher education in New Jersey.” The fund provides both financial assistance and support services such as counseling, tutoring, and coursework to students from educationally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds who attend Rutgers and the other participating institutions in the state.

Admissions to the Educational Opportunity Fund program are based on applicants’ demonstration that they come from an educationally and economically disadvantaged background, have lived in the state for at least 12 consecutive months, and meet the academic criteria for acceptance at one of the 42 participating institutions. Undergraduate grants range from $200 to $2,650 annually depending on the type of institution and demonstrated financial need.

Farris noted that the school of engineering’s success with fund participants led it to create the Engineering Opportunity Program in 2014 to include a larger pool of students from

historically minoritized populations. Students accepted to this expanded program, he added, do not have to meet all of the financial eligibility requirements of the larger Educational Opportunity Fund program, though they do need to be admitted to the school of engineering using a holistic review.

“By combining the Educational Opportunity Fund and the Engineering Opportunity Program, Engineers of the Future is building out our successful enrollment of students from underrepresented groups and underprivileged backgrounds,” said Farris in closing.

ADMISSIONS POLICIES AND PRACTICES AT IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

Iowa has three public universities that report to a single Board of Regents, and Iowa State University, said Sriram Sundararajan, is the state’s flagship engineering and science university. The Board of Regents admissions procedure states that students who meet certain minimum requirements can gain admission to any of the state’s universities and pick any major. The requirements, which include a composite of ACT score, high school GPA, and high school core courses, are known as the Regent Admission Index (RAI). In general, said Sundararajan, students admitted through this process succeed in their chosen field. Iowa State also has a holistic review process for students who do not quite meet the RAI cutoff, and in general those students also succeed in college. A third program, called the open option, allows students with RAI scores far below the minimum to pursue math and science courses in the college of liberal arts and science, establish their GPAs, and then enroll in the college of engineering. Sundararajan noted that, as a result of the pandemic, the next two admissions cycles will be test-optional, and the holistic review process will play a much larger role in admissions decisions.

The engineering school also has an admissions partnership program with many of the state’s community colleges as well as a few outside of Iowa. This program connects students at the partner schools with an advisor at Iowa State who can “have a much more integral part in the academic planning of that particular student so that they have their pathway, what courses they’re going to take, and any questions they might have, before they transfer to Iowa State.”

Sundararajan added that the engineering school also has a “stackable” scholarship program that uses a holistic review process to add an engineering scholarship on top of a university scholarship for deserving students. The review process requires students to answer two essay-based questions. He reported that yields for these scholarships have increased from 30 percent in 2018 to 61 percent for fall of 2021.

On a final note, Sundararajan said that 95 percent of engineering college students participate in learning communities, which have increased retention significantly. In addition, the college of engineering offers a summer program, with coursework and a research component, for students from historically minoritized groups. This program, he said, has been helpful in getting students engaged in engineering research.

DISCUSSION

Darryll Pines began the discussion by asking the speakers to identify the partnerships that have been most critical to the success of their programs. De Sousa replied that partnerships with community colleges and industry have been key to success: the community college partners were selected based on having shared goals, and industry partners have provided both funding and

employment opportunities for Texas A&M graduates. For CSULB, Golshani noted that partnership with the local high school and community college has been crucial given that Long Beach is one of the most diverse areas in that part of the state. Also important have been the City of Long Beach, which provides one year of free tuition at the city’s community college; transfer agreements with eight community colleges in Los Angeles and Orange Counties; the MESA Program at thirteen nearby school districts; and corporate partnerships that have enabled CSULB to establish learning communities to help students who want a different level of support services.

At Rutgers, the partnership with the New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund has been critical, said Farris, as have partnerships with the state’s low-resourced high schools, which enable Rutgers to find students who have the potential to perform well and be successful despite not having the advantages of students at wealthier schools. He noted, too, that there is now a powerful network of Educational Opportunity Fund graduates in the state, as well as committed industry partners, that steer prospective engineers to the Engineers of the Future program at Rutgers. For Iowa State, the partnership between the college of engineering and the admissions infrastructure has been an important contributor to diversifying the engineering student body, together with the presence of a staff member in the dean’s office who serves as the point person for all of the individuals in the community colleges, said Sundararajan.

The next question for the speakers asked about the challenges their institutions faced in reaching diverse student groups during the pandemic. Farris said that Rutgers implemented a Zoom system that actually increased contact between applicants and advisors, perhaps because it was easy and protected student privacy. Sundararajan said that finding the balance between in-person meetings and virtual sessions was challenging because some prospective students want to come to campus, while others find that virtual meetings create more opportunities to interact with admissions staff. De Sousa said that Texas A&M used to have regular college fairs, but quickly switched to webinars and Zoom sessions, coupled with a big marketing plan, to continue reaching out to underserved populations. The university also hired two students to call prospective engineering students and speak with them and their families. Golshani reiterated his concern that the “concept of average becomes the dominating denominator for providing services and educational aids to study,” adding that because “success in higher education is more correlated with family income than it is with high school scholastic achievements,” it is important to provide learning opportunities and fit for different learners.

BREAKOUT DISCUSSION

Following the day’s two panel sessions, attendees distributed themselves in virtual breakout rooms to spend 45 minutes discussing the following four questions and then report back to the assembled workshop:

• How are the policies you heard about today affecting your work/institution?
• What policies would you like to implement?
• What barriers do you see to implementing these policies?
• How would you overcome these barriers?

The first report came from Amy Kramer (Ohio State University), who recounted that one of her group’s members spoke about (i) working with Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) to help students transition from their home communities into the university setting, and (ii)

acknowledging the importance of both accounting for the lived experiences of those students when considering their applications and discounting standardized test scores that can disadvantage Indigenous students. Another aspect of the discussion focused on the use of GRE scores in graduate admissions and how removing those scores would affect admissions, particularly for international students whose home countries may have different metrics for student achievement. More broadly, the group discussed “seeing how some of the inequities that occur in the K-12 education system are transitioned into our universities…when you consider these SAT and ACT scores.”

The discussion of barriers focused on the desire to “tell folks that our engineering students have this great high average ACT score” without knowing how well those scores really reflect ability or predict success. The group also discussed how to address the stigma that many faculty associate with students who have low test scores, and working with community colleges to help prepare students for transfer. This group also noted the importance of conveying to faculty the scholarship and data that support holistic review and test-optional/test-blind admissions procedures as a means of getting them on board with more equitable admissions policies.

On behalf of the next group, Teri Reed (University of Cincinnati) reported a great deal of discussion of the difficulty of convincing faculty about the benefits of test-blind admissions policies and of overcoming outdated ideas of admissions that many faculty members hold. The group also talked about the importance of regular, ongoing implicit bias training for staff who perform holistic reviews and of continually gathering data on successful students and graduates as a means of addressing biases and myths associated with engineering. The members of the group noted that even when programs are successful and collect data that demonstrate success, the process of expanding the programs or implementing them at other institutions can fail because those responsible for implementing them have outdated visions of what a successful student looks like at their institution. Myth busting, in fact, was the common theme to this group’s discussions, Reed said, and busting those myths is supported by champions in the admissions office and across the campus to have “safe and inclusive spaces for students” that increase engineering “identity and belongingness and things we know lead to success for our students.”

Adrian Parks (University of North Texas, UNT) reported that her breakout group talked about improving holistic approaches to admissions that are test-blind or test-optional, particularly for first-time college students and students from community colleges. This group noted the importance of advising students at community colleges about which courses they need to take and which they do not, to optimize their time before transferring to a four-year institution, and to increase their likelihood of completing a four-year engineering degree after two years at university. One member of this group noted that legislation in their state requires students to submit test scores, so there was a discussion about advocating for legislative changes to old, ineffective policies. This group also discussed the importance of educating faculty and collecting data to support new admissions policies that bolster access, equity, and inclusion.

The final report came from Michael Brown (Rutgers University), who said his group discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic opened the door at many institutions to try test-optional and test-blind admissions practices, gain experience administering those practices, and see how they affect diversity initiatives at their schools. The hope of this group was that the experiences of universities and their faculties will help them see that test scores are not the best predictors of success for their students. The group did discuss the financial and workforce challenges of

moving to an entirely holistic admissions process and suggested that artificial intelligence could provide an important tool for easing that burden.