Underrepresented Minority Diversity in Materials Science and Engineering
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Underrepresented Minority Diversity in Materials Science and Engineering Keith J Bowman, School of Materials Engineering and School of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA ABSTRACT During the decade 2000 to 2009, the diversity trends for bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and faculty underwent very different changes in the number and fraction of women represented compared to men in the field of materials science and engineering (MSE). Although the number and fraction of women increased substantially in graduate programs and within faculties, the fraction of women receiving bachelor’s of science degrees in engineering (BSE) in this field was significantly lower in 2009 than in 2000. In contrast with gender, the outcomes for diversity in terms of underrepresented minorities (URMs) across the decade are more disappointing. The potential implications are discussed with respect to ongoing limited degree attainment of URMs in many engineering and science disciplines INTRODUCTION The individual cultures and character of disciplines or even specific departments within engineering or science [1-5] may be essential factors that impact recruiting, retention and success at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Materials Science and Engineering, as well as the four largest engineering disciplines, chemical engineering (ChE), civil engineering (CE), mechanical engineering (ME) and electrical and computer engineering (ECE) experienced substantial declines in the percentage of female BSE degrees across the last decade [4]. The objective of this paper is to assess and evaluate diversity in terms of underrepresented minorities for undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty across the past decade for one of the smaller and newer engineering disciplines [5, 6], MSE, and place the trends in context. This assessment is particularly timely since changes in the categories used for minorities may make future evaluations more challenging. METHODOLOGY Data assessed in this paper was acquired from the American Society for Engineering Education database using the datamining tool (http://asee.org/publications/profiles/index.cfm#Datamining_Tool) between August, 2010 and the October, 2010 and followed the approach used by Bowman [4, 5, 7]. The data used here was limited to the seventy-eight materials science and engineering programs that reported either undergraduate or graduate degree production between 2000 and 2009 to ASEE (listed in the Appendix). A very small number of programs did not consistently report one or more datasets discussed in this paper in a given year. The impact of any errors in the dataset are likely insufficient to change the results and interpretation. For purposes of this paper the category underrepresented minorities (URM) is given as the sum of the African American, Hispanic
American and Native American categories used in the ASEE database. This may lead to some inaccuracies due to individuals potentially belonging to more than one category, but the nature of the
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