Professional Life
Minority Progress, Setbacks in Engineering
By US Black Engineer Staff
Jan 17, 2003, 13:13

Two recent reports represent a mixed bag of good and bad news about diversity in engineering and science in the U.S.
The Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology http://www.cpst.org says women have made substantial progress in education in natural sciences and engineering over the past 35 years, increasing their percentage of earned bachelor's degrees from 23 percent in 1966 to 39 percent in 2000. However, the group reports, gains by the underrepresented minority groups -- Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans -- have not been as great. Blacks earned 8.3 percent of the nation's science and engineering bachelor's degrees in 2000, according to the commission's compendium, "Professional Women and Minorities."

At the same time, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering ( NACME; http://www.nacme.org ) announced that U.S. educational institutions enrolled a record 15,329 minority engineering students in 2001, topping the previous high of 15,181, which was reached in 1992. Enrollment of Black engineering freshmen rose by 4.5 percent, from 8,192 in 2000 to 8,552 last year.

On the downside, enrollment of Latinos and Native Americans stagnated, according to NACME. Moreover, the increase in minority freshmen did not keep pace with the nation's overall increase in engineering freshmen, so the percentage of minorities in last year's class actually shrank to the lowest percentage in 12 years, from 14.9 percent to 14.6 percent.

"After a few down years, we're in a turnaround mode," says NACME president and CEO John Brooks Slaughter. He calls this a time for "reinvestment."

NACME, the nation's largest private source of scholarships for minority engineering students, reports it has decreased its giving recently, after suffering major financial setbacks, including the loss of a grant awarded by the WorldCom Foundation in 1999.