Successful Design for Minority Engineers : CSUN’s Recruitment, Retention Are Models

About eight years ago, Jon Shively and several other white engineering professors at California State University, Northridge, drove into South-Central Los Angeles to dine, in search of soul food and enlightenment.

At the time, CSUN had never had a black or Hispanic student complete four years of engineering school for a degree. University officials had asked Shively and the others to figure out why. A trip to the inner city might help, they reasoned.

“The idea of eating at a cultural restaurant was to try to get a feeling of what it’s like to be a minority,” Shively said.

“We were all white. We were the minority at the restaurant.”

Shively, whose specialty is manufacturing engineering, said the meal was tasty and that he must have learned something from the experience: By the end of this semester, the CSUN School of Engineering will have graduated more than 200 black and Hispanic students.

Program Used as Model

The effort to recruit, retain and graduate minority students as engineers at CSUN has attracted notice. Last week, the Northridge program was recommended by the board of trustees of the 19-campus California State University as a model for the other campuses.

“They have an outstanding program going out there,” CSU Vice Chancellor Herbert L. Carter said. “It has a fundamental academic flavor and proves you can get results if you go about it the right way.”

The main feature of the minority program in the engineering school is that teachers, administrators and students play the most active role. This contrasts with programs at other schools, where minority recruitment is the responsibility of a central office that tries to recruit minority students for the entire campus, Carter said.

Although the other CSU campuses will not be required to pattern their minority recruitment after the program at CSUN, Carter said “we want them to take a good look at it, and then do what they think is best, remembering that they have to do something.”

62% Graduate

Carter said the statistics on minority recruitment and graduation by the CSUN School of Engineering are far better than those at other state schools, although he did not have examples available.

Enrique Ainsworth, the Latino director of the minority engineering program, said that, since the effort began in 1978, 62% of the black, Hispanic and Native American students who enroll in engineering as freshmen graduate, contrasted with about 24% nationwide. The program does not include students of Asian descent.

Before the program began, Ainsworth said, the campus’ minority enrollment was clustered in other disciplines, with “virtually no minorities--just nobody” in engineering. Now, of the 2,100 full-time students enrolled in the engineering school, about 430 are members of minorities--doubling the approximately 10% minority enrollment rate among the university’s 30,000 students, Ainsworth said.

A key statistic, the percentage of minority freshmen who pass their first-year courses and continue as sophomores within the CSUN engineering school--is 95%, Ainsworth said.

‘Personal Touch’ Cited

Stephanie Babb, a 22-year-old computer science major, said the success of the program can be attributed to its “personal touch.”

Babb said she was first contacted by Ainsworth and other CSUN engineering professors when she was a junior at Locke High School in South Los Angeles.

“They came and talked to me, and then just didn’t let up. They made me feel like they really wanted to educate me,” Babb said.

Minority students recruited for the engineering major attend a six-week program at CSUN, a refresher course in mathematics and other subjects, before they begin taking freshmen classes. They are then required, in their first year, to enroll in a yearlong general engineering class established just for them. They are given detailed advice by faculty counselors each semester and are required to attend study groups with other students.

Summer jobs are encouraged, and the majority of minority engineering students find work within the industry through a job bank established solely for minority students, Ainsworth said.

Faculty members who choose to participate in the program go through semester-long training that focuses on the educational needs of minority students.

“We do role playing, have guest speakers, see films, go on field trips, anything you can think of,” said Gregg Dixon, a mechanical engineering professor.

Much of the training, Shively said, focuses on understanding other cultures.

“A lot of what we’ve learned through training are the subtleties,” Shively said.

“Say I get an Hispanic student who comes to me for help, and I’m sitting there, and I notice he’s not making any eye contact. Maybe I start to think he’s got something to hide, or is being shifty for some reason. . . . What I don’t understand is that that’s a cultural thing. This student is not making eye contact out of the spirit of humility, something that is a characteristic of his culture.”

Teachers Listen

Ainsworth said engineering professors typically do not have the communication skills that put minority students at ease. Through the program, teachers are taught to let the students do the talking, and to try to turn the conversation away from strictly academic topics.

“The engineering teacher is usually a lecturer rather than a listener,” Ainsworth said. “One of our biggest concerns is turning that around. What will oftentimes happen is minority students will come in to talk to a teacher, and, if it doesn’t work, they won’t ever come in again.”

Such discouragement often leads to students dropping out, Ainsworth said.

Stefnie Harris, a 21-year-old electrical engineering student, said the support system that the program offers, providing advice from both professors and other minority students, is what keeps minorities in the department at CSUN.

Support Group

“If I had a problem before, I’d run home and tell my mom,” Harris said. “If I have a problem now at school, I’ve got a whole bunch of other students I can talk to who understand exactly what my problem might be.”

Recruiting minority students and seeing that they graduate has become a priority for the CSU system in recent years, Vice Chancellor Carter said.

“The fact of the matter is that, if we’re not successful in educating ethnics, there are going to be serious long-term potential negatives,” Carter said. “California is a state that is going to require an educated populace to energize the economy, and much of that populace is going to be made up of minorities.”

Carter said demographers are forecasting that, by the year 2010, the majority of California residents will be members of what are now minorities.