ENGINEERING: THE NEXT GENERATIONS

A foundation is establishing a program to bring engineering prep to often-overlooked high school students. 
by Jeffrey Winters, Associate Editor

It's not an argument, just a statement: Engineers in America come overwhelmingly from one demographic category—white males. The reason for this isn't that high school girls and minorities aren't engineering prospects. Indeed, according to Irving McPhail, executive vice president of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering in White Plains, N.Y., when given the skills to actually perform university level engineering work, minority students excel.

"What we have found over the last 33 years is that if young people have the appropriate background, coursework, interest, and motivation," McPhail said, "we can produce under-represented minority engineers in pretty impressive numbers, with very impressive grade point averages and graduation rates."

Unfortunately, too few high school graduates are ready to tackle college-level engineering. Only about one student in 25 from African-American, Latino, and American Indian communities have taken the appropriate coursework to enter schools of engineering.

"We call it the 4 percent problem," McPhail said. "It's a problem of input."

NACME's manager for pre-engineering programs, Raluca Cadar, put it bluntly. "The pipeline is so small," Cadar said, "that universities are, in some cases, running out of minority engineering students to give scholarships to."

According to Jon Reinhard, "If we can double the number of engineering-ready minority students to 7 or 8 percent, tens of thousand of young people would be added to the engineering field."

Reinhard is a project manager for the National Academy Foundation, a nonprofit education reform organization based in New York City. The foundation is working with NACME to launch a series of high school programs called Academies of Engineering, designed to provide students with the skills needed to pursue engineering at the college level. Beginning with a group of 13 high schools in 2008, the foundation hopes to create about 100 "schools within a school" over the next decade, each following a science and math curriculum that has already proven successful in other contexts.

The foundation has a track record of success in bringing specialized education to impoverished neighborhoods. It was founded by Sanford Weill, the former chief executive officer at Citigroup, who noticed that the pool of graduates from college economics and finance programs seemed be drawn from affluent families. After learning that very few high school graduates from minority neighborhoods were proficient in the skills needed to complete a college business school program, he created a charity that would establish finance-oriented academies within high schools.

In addition to finance, the foundation also sponsors academies oriented around information technology and the hotel and tourism industry. Each of the 510 academies is dedicated to providing relevant, real-world experience to the 50,000-some students in their programs. Internships are mandatory, and businesses are recruited to provide them. Some of the companies that have partnered with the National Academy Foundation include American Express, Sallie Mae, Marriott International, and Verizon.

The academies have proven successful to date, with nearly all the students graduating from high school and more than 80 percent going on to college. What makes those numbers even more impressive is that not only are most of the academies established in poor and minority neighborhoods, where schools have had problems educating students, but the programs are open to any student willing to commit to it. There are no entrance exams or other prerequisites.

Last January, the foundation hired Reinhard to start a new group of engineering academies—prompted in part by the difficulty some of its corporate partners reported in finding enough young American engineers. Reinhard turned to NACME, which has until now concentrated on post-secondary education and mentoring, to help support the academies through its network of corporate and university partners.

It's one thing to establish a school centered on engineering; it's another to figure out just what to teach, especially to children who may not have a solid grounding in the fundamentals of math and science. Reinhardt and McPhail said they quickly discovered that a very successful curriculum already existed. Project Lead The Way, a nonprofit organization based in Clifton Park, N.Y., has been providing an advanced, engineering-oriented curriculum for schools for a decade. "We didn't think we needed to reinvent the wheel," McPhail said.

It turned out that most of the Project Lead The Way schools were in rural and suburban districts. That made a partnership with the Academies of Engineering especially attractive, since it would be targeting an entirely different area.

The 13 schools now setting up the first engineering academies are spread from New York City to San Diego. "We're going to go where the students are," Reinhard said. He said the plan is to expand to more than 100 academies by 2010, each year graduating some 10,000 students who are ready to tackle college level engineering. NACME's McPhail said its partnerships with engineering departments will help the graduates find scholarships, and its connections with engineering firms would help students find jobs when their education is complete.

"Over half a million engineers will be needed over the next decade to replace those engineers who are going to retire," McPhail added. "And at least that number are going to be needed to fill the additional demand. The question becomes: Who's going to be available to fill those jobs?"