Connecting Efforts to Support Minorities in Engineering Education: Proceedings of a Workshop (2023)
Chapter: 8 Collaborations Between Minority-Serving Institutions and Predominantly White Institutions
8
Collaborations Between Minority-Serving Institutions and Predominantly White Institutions
Pamela Holland Obiomon (Prairie View A&M University), workshop planning committee member, introduced and moderated the panel on collaborations between minority-serving institutions (MSIs)74 and predominantly White institutions (PWIs).
Felicia Benton-Johnson (Georgia Tech, GT) discussed GT’s “authentic collaborative approach” in working with MSIs on academics, research, industry relations, and programming. Regarding academics, GT leads the Dual Degree Engineering Program,75 which was established in 1969 and connects with Atlanta University Center Consortium76 as well as many other HBCUs and community colleges; participating students earn BS degrees from both institutions. Benton-Johnson reported that the program’s success stems in part from both an agreed-upon curriculum and “communication that takes place not just with faculty but also with program directors who are supporting the students on their academic journey.”
Speaking about Engineering Research Centers, Benton-Johnson said that they function “as a foundation to support and to expand our relationships and partnerships” with MSIs. She cited GT’s Research Next77 as an example, describing it as “a statewide collaborative focusing on what’s next in innovation and research” that partners with the Atlanta University Center Consortium as well as institutions outside Georgia.
In terms of industry funding opportunities, GT encourages its MSI partners to submit their own proposals for collaborative work, so that funding goes directly to the MSI, bringing “awareness to industry about what the MSIs have to offer and the value that they bring.”
GT’s programming with MSI partners also leverages resources, sharing staff and best practices and maintaining students’ scholarships after they transfer to GT, said Benton-Johnson. In addition, GT leverages their LSAMP and AGEP78 programs. Some GT PhD students “are looking to go into academia, but they may…really have the passion to be in academia at an MSI,” so GT creates bridges for students to move into jobs at their partner institutions.
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74 The planning committee wanted to highlight collaborations including institutions that were founded with a mission of serving individuals from historically minoritized populations, and many formerly PWI institutions are now classified as MSIs based on enrollment. Of the schools represented on the panel, University of California–Irvine has been classified as AANAPISI and HSI, and Arizona State University is an HSI. In addition, a scheduled panelist from Tuskegee University (an HBCU) was unable to join the panel at the last minute.
75 https://ceed.gatech.edu/dual-degrees-engineering-program-ddep
76 https://aucenter.edu/member-institutions/
77 https://researchnext.gatech.edu/
78 Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/alliances-graduate-education-and-professoriate-agep
Her takeaway was that the GT programs owe their success to both authentic collaborations and institutional buy-in at every level.
Michael Dennin (University of California–Irvine, UCI) explained how UCI handled its transition from a PWI to an MSI. “A lot of the changes started around 2010 and then there was a series of events around 2014 where we realized that we were on the path to being designated a Hispanic-serving institution. It was of great interest for the faculty and administration to be not just an HSI but what we called a Hispanic thriving institution,” he said. The university was actually designated an AANAPISI79 a few months before the HSI designation in 2017, and also has a Black Thriving Initiative as well as other initiatives.80 He reported that UCI was selected for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) SEA Change Bronze Award.81
UCI’s program called Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience: Partnering in Leadership for Undergraduate Students82 pairs graduate and undergraduate students for mentoring. It not only became “a very successful scholarship retention program, but also engaged the students with the grad students in a way that showed increased outcomes of students wanting to go to graduate school.”
“Most of our partnerships,” Dennin added, “are around graduate and faculty pathways through bridge programs and other initiatives, and leveraging the University of California system in a very exciting way to accomplish a lot of this.” As an example, he cited the Inclusive Graduate Education Network, which brings students from different backgrounds into graduate programs, and UCI provides “supplemental funds to bring students in the summer before their experience to give them a head start.” He also mentioned the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellows program, which provides funding for the transition from postdoc to faculty.
In closing he noted that a structural element in higher education is that often graduate students and faculty are recruited based on the institution they attend. Acknowledging that “universities don’t have a good history of intentionally and actively recruiting great students that are in many other places, including HBCUs,” partnerships with many types of institutions to recruit graduate students and faculty can diversify the professoriate.
According to Tirupalavanam Ganesh (Arizona State University), ASU tries to serve first-generation and students from historically marginalized populations by providing “role models who are like them.” He explained that the university acts in the context of the state’s 2010 ban on “affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to or discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public education, public contracting, and public employment,” explained Ganesh, so ASU’s programs cannot be offered only to students from historically marginalized populations and “all services are open to everybody.”
He described “opportunities for both high school and community college students to visit our campus and our engineering facilities,” including attending an undergraduate research symposia or innovation showcase where seniors present their work. One such opportunity, the Engineers from Day One program,83 “includes a number of school districts in the area and
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79 Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–Serving Institution
80 https://inclusion.uci.edu/action-plan/msi/
81 https://inclusion.uci.edu/action-plan/msi/uci-sea-change/ and more information about the AAAS SEA Change award is at https://seachange.aaas.org/awards/overview
82 https://grad.uci.edu/diversity-equity-inclusion/decade-plus/
Maricopa Community Colleges, one of the largest community college systems in Arizona.” And in a one-credit course offered at both ASU and in Maricopa Community Colleges students can work with a nonprofit and design a solution to a problem. These opportunities are funded through industry support, so “student teams are funded with money to deliver a product to their nonprofit client,” explained Ganesh. When students visit the campus, they also meet with academic advisors to talk about transfer issues as well as both online and face-to-face programs.
Speaking about tools that help students who want to transfer to ASU, whether from Arizona or another state, Ganesh cited ASU’s transfer pathway tool,84 Transfer Articulation System for the State,85 and fully online accredited degree programs.86 He added that between 2014 and 2020 transfer enrollment in the online degree programs by Black or Hispanic/Latine students more than doubled. But he also mentioned the challenge of funding transfer students beyond their Pell grants. “What we would like to see happen is to build concurrent enrollment programs. We currently have an example with our nursing program.”87
Shernita Lee (Virginia Tech, VT) began by describing VT’s Annual HBCU/MSI Summit, which fosters relationships between VT and several MSIs. “It started through our college of engineering, but we’ve expanded to include all of our other colleges,” she said, adding that it includes undergraduate students, master’s students, and faculty. The summit has three main topics. The first is research and includes sharing resources across institutions in a way that benefits the MSIs and supports VT’s mission. The second, recruitment, provides an overview of what “the graduate school process looks like at VT, what are some things you can do to make yourself competitive and successful as a graduate student once you pick what institution you would like to attend,” she said, adding that the recruiting process also allows students to work with both VT and MSI faculty members at different times.
“The last piece is degree partnerships. There are a lot of informal partnerships that take place at an institution of this size, but we do have a few official partnerships with HBCUs,” she said. For example, in the industrial and systems engineering program, “the student completes roughly three years at Virginia State and the last two years at VT,” earning both a BS and an MS degree.
Lee said that VT communicates with MSIs and PWIs to recruit graduate students. She noted that it is important to not only provide “exposure and say ‘here’s a great school to attend,’ but also make sure that financial support is there.”
DISCUSSION
Obiomon asked Benton-Johnson for suggestions about how “PWIs that are not in close proximity to MSIs can foster engagement, partnerships, and recruitment of MSI students for research, graduate programs, and faculty?” Benton-Johnson responded that it is important to host focused programs, using the GT example of a program that identifies students who are looking to go into academia and a graduate recruitment weekend for students from historically minoritized populations from across the nation. Ganesh added mention of an ASU program called Summer
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84 https://admission.asu.edu/transfer/MyPath2ASU
86 https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/
87 https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/undergraduate/rn-bsn-concurrent-enrollment-bsn/
Research Initiative88 that works with HBCUs through industry partners. “This is a way for us to attract students from MSIs, with industry support, and students get a $5000 stipend, which makes a big difference in making sure they have a rich experience and are supported when they are doing research,” he explained.
Obiomon asked about barriers or challenges to partnerships. “Our big challenge,” said Ganesh, “is that oftentimes people tend to do things by themselves and just make an announcement saying ‘we want people to show up’ and that never works.” He elaborated: “a lot of legwork, faculty-to-faculty collaborations across multiple institutions, and leadership” make partnerships work well. Lee observed that, in general, those signing partnership agreements are unlikely to be the people who actually implement the ideas and do the work; she stressed constant evaluation of how partnerships are working.
Taking another question from the audience for Lee, Obiomon asked about external or internal funding for students and faculty to attend the summits. Noting that the summits typically have between 150 and 200 attendees, Lee said that lodging and meals are covered for all attendees; travel costs are not, but VT is discussing travel support funding with some industry partners. She added that depending on the participating department, there may be some funds available to help offset travel costs.
Obiomon inquired about ways to increase awareness of scholarships and opportunities for students and others in the education community. “I think it is the responsibility of us, as the institutions with the scholarships, to be way more intentional and engaged out there,” answered Dennin. To increase awareness about scholarship opportunities he stressed reaching out not only to groups that have not traditionally engaged in programs but also “to the institutions where there are excellent students that are just getting missed because no one is reaching out to them.” He surmised that a little creativity and advance work could help institutions recruit undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs. Ganesh highlighted ASU’s President Obama scholarship for first-time full-time first-year students, which “allows us to give Arizona residents who have a family income of $42,400 or less to apply and receive scholarships that pay for their entire college experience if they maintain their GPA.” He noted that “this means working with high school counselors and advisors around the state, and also reaching out to first-generation students and others who might qualify, through a phone campaign.”
Directing the next question to Ganesh, Obiomon asked, “What barriers or challenges did you experience in the early development of these programs?” Ganesh talked about the importance of infrastructure, with examples from ASU to elaborate how building strong relationships with local community colleges, as well as those across the nation, has helped with the success of the university’s collaborative programs. Benton-Johnson mentioned the challenge of fundraising to support students who transfer to GT or arrive as graduate students. She works with university leadership to offer out-of-state tuition waivers and “with partnering institutions to have a corporate entity to provide scholarships while students are at their home institution that follow them to the partnering institution,” she said.
Obiomon asked the panelists about challenges in developing faculty research collaborations across institutions and ways to overcome them. “We have been focused a lot on pathways,” said Dennin, but authentic “faculty research collaborations across institutions, particularly in STEM fields that are lab-based,” remain challenging. Benton-Johnson gave an example of a conference held in the early 2000s that brought visiting faculty to the GT campus to learn about current research and find collaborations to start putting research proposals together.
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Lee spoke about institutional support, and cited a Virginia Tech institute that offers seed funding for faculty partnerships with HBCUs and other MSIs. Obiomon added that she has “heard our faculty say that there are times when the larger institutions do not respect the researchers at HBCUs, and also when proposals are written, the larger institution dominates because they have more resources.”
Obiomon asked whether there are enough role models in this space. Dennin responded, “I think we don’t have enough role models,” and “there has been too much of a drain on role models’ time. That is why we are building those other structures so the burden isn’t all on the specific role models.” At the same time, “you cannot use lack of [role models] as an excuse to not increase engagement.” He stressed the importance of intentional outreach from universities.
Obiomon conveyed another question from the audience about involving graduate students in partnership programs. Ganesh referenced strong student chapters of organizations such as NSBE, SHPE, and SWE “at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Our academic advisors and faculty who conduct research and interact with students and teach in those programs build the infrastructure. We sponsor students to go to the professional conferences at the national level and interact with other peers. That is the best way for you to build a network.” Benton-Johnson commented on the importance of leveraging resources, especially NSF alliances like LSAMP and AGEP, and to be able to “utilize mentors who are part of these programs.”
Taking the last question from the audience, Obiomon asked the panelists about challenges in their programs. Benton-Johnson said that one of the big challenges for GT’s Dual Degrees Engineering Program is the time to completion for students, because they are pursuing two degrees and maintaining a very heavy courseload. She said it is very helpful to establish peer mentoring networks especially for transfer students. Talking about UCI’s transition to a minority thriving institution, Dennin said that, “though we have made great strides and there are a lot of good things happening, there is sort of a last piece for many faculty to really make it an instinct, to switch from a deficit-based to a strength-based model.” Ganesh noted that one of the challenges at ASU is financial need beyond Pell grants and scholarships, because “most students are taking care of their family, and they are often working. Expecting them to go full-time in our 4-year institution is a big, big challenge. That is why we have seen an increase in the online degree program.” He explained that “the advantage of online degree programs is that they cost less than face-to-face programs,” but cautioned that they can create “a sense of isolation because [students] are working by themselves.” Lee cited the importance of academic support for students coming from HBCUs and other MSIs to ensure that they have the right foundation to complete their degree.
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