Education |

CU Boulder engineering student diversity grows, but challenges remain

Alan Sanchez wanted to become an engineer for two reasons: because his father didn’t have the same opportunity and because he knew it was one of the most difficult careers he could choose.

Sanchez, a University of Colorado Boulder aerospace engineering graduate, started getting his hands on tools as a child. His father installed heating and cooling units as an HVAC technician, and Sanchez often tagged along.

“It’s a lot of technical work. He installs and does the dirty work, but he always told me, if he had the opportunity and the money, he would have loved to be an engineer,” Sanchez said. “That made me want to make the most of my opportunities. He sparked that interest in me.”

Many of Sanchez’s high school classmates and family didn’t share his ambition. They talked about careers similar to his dad’s — becoming repairmen, mechanics or heating, ventilation and air conditioning technicians. Hands-on work.

But Sanchez persisted, and he was accepted into CU Boulder’s program, going on to earn his master’s degree and land a job at Tesla as a mechanical design engineer.

It wasn’t easy, Sanchez said. He often looked around a classroom and didn’t see anyone else who looked like him. Most of his college classmates graduated from rich school districts with lots of resources and had parents or family members who were aerospace engineers at big name companies. He felt like a fake.

“I didn’t know anyone who was an aerospace engineer. It made me feel one step behind, and that was hard to deal with, especially when I would struggle on certain assignments,” he said. “One of the negative thoughts that would come to mind is maybe I’m not cut out for this, that imposter syndrome.”

But Sanchez also found community, and there was diversity if you knew where to look.

Sanchez’s experience mirrors an ongoing effort at CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science to buck a decades-long trend of science, technology, engineering and math fields being predominantly white and male.

Enrollment numbers show those efforts are working. This year’s freshmen are the most diverse and most academically qualified class of students in the program’s history, said outgoing Dean Bobby Braun, who is leaving for NASA in January.

But there is still more work to do. Each graduating class is getting more diverse, Braun said, but they are still not representative of Colorado as a whole.

“Frankly, it’s not enough,” he said. “We are making progress, but it’s going to take us a number of years to both improve the stream of students coming into college and to get the retention and persistence metrics to be equivalent across all groups.”

Diversity trending up

Diversity and inclusion have been driving forces in the College of Engineering and Applied Science for more than a decade, and the changing demographics of first-year students show that it’s working.

The number of female freshman has more than doubled over the last 10 years, and the percent of freshman who are female went from 25% in 2009 to 45% this year. Underrepresented minorities — which includes Hispanic, African American, Native and Indigenous Americans, Alaska natives and Hawaiian natives — increased from 9% in 2009 to 25% this year, and first-generation students increased from 15% in 2009 to 20% this year.

When Braun was hired as dean three years ago, it was clear that faculty and staff members wanted to keep pushing toward diversity and inclusion.

“It’s basically a part of our DNA,” Braun said. “We are the flagship engineering college for our state, and that carries with it a responsibility to look like your state.”

With programs like the Broadening Opportunity through Leadership and Diversity, or BOLD, Center and the National Center for Women & Information Technology firmly rooted in the college, Braun said he has focused on small, specific ways to make students and potential students of all backgrounds feel more welcome.

One way is to have students from the BOLD Center reach out to prospective students after they visit. Braun also started visiting schools outside of the metro Denver area — towns where students are more likely to stay home and not pursue higher education. After every visit to a rural school, Braun said, the college sees an uptick in applications from those communities.

Another way is the college’s marketing campaign, I Look Like An Engineer, which promotes profiles of female students and students from underrepresented minority groups.

Sophomore Carlie Charp, a technology engineering major, was featured in the campaign.

Charp always had an aptitude for science and math, so pursuing a degree in engineering felt like a natural fit.

She remembers the first day of a Calculus II class and being one of two women in a class of 50 students.

“It was weird, because that’s not how it was in high school,” she said. “Being one of the only girls in the class makes you feel isolated.”

But Charp is seeing more diverse classmates as she progresses through the program, and classes taught by women help balance out classes taught by and filled with men.

“In my classes taught by women, they assume that everybody is up to par on what they’re doing,” Charp said. “They never assume anyone is less adequate in what they’re doing.”

Junior Addison Woodard said she usually doesn’t notice the number of diverse students in her classes.

“If I step back and look, I see there is a difference numerically, but I’ve never experienced discrimination or been put down because I was a woman. My input has never been invalid,” she said.

She has noticed an effort by professors to make female students feel more at ease — like if she’s in a lab group and there’s another woman in the class, those students will be in a group together.

“We’re never isolated, and they’re very conscious of that,” she said. “I think it’s helpful because I’m less likely to raise my voice and have a big demeanor about an idea I’m passionate about. Having someone else who interacts that way in the group, they can back you up and say, ‘Keep going. Keep saying this.’”

While Woodard said she doesn’t feel like she’s been impacted by a lack of diversity, she sees the importance of having more of it.

“I think it will only increase the value of the learning and research that comes out of CU,” she said. “With diversity comes different backgrounds and coming from different walks of life. Everyone is going to approach a potentially basic engineering problem completely differently, and the more approaches we can have, the more sound result, the more sound engineering we can get out of it which is going to result in a much safer product for society.”

Pursuing a more diverse student body is based on the knowledge that there are talented students from all backgrounds across Colorado, said Sarah Miller, associate dean for Access, Inclusion, and Student Programs.

“These talented students are in our state, we know they’re there, but our challenge is to help them see a pathway for themselves here and to see engineering as a profession that’s fulfilling and something they would excel in,” Miller said. “We want anyone in the state to know they can be a CU Boulder engineer if that’s what they want to do.”

For Sanchez, that means tackling community and cultural beliefs about what young people should do with their lives.

“These social constructs in the Hispanic community are basically, this is not something you think about or talk about,” Sanchez said. “Becoming an engineer isn’t even an option.”

Sanchez said he doesn’t know why that barrier exists, but shifting the diversity in STEM fields means shifting that long-held belief.

“We have to find a way to teach kids that it’s an option, because not every parent has the opportunity to be there and do that for their kids,” he said.

Retention part of equation

The increase in the number of diverse students enrolling in the College of Engineering is encouraging, but it’s only one part of what needs to happen to have a student body that reflects Colorado’s diversity.

Getting students across the finish line to graduation is still a challenge, Braun said, though data shows those numbers are slowly improving.

Of the 1,110 bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2019, 18% of those were earned by underrepresented minority students and 25% by female students, which is up from the 8% of degrees earned by minority students and 16% by female students in 2009.

From Sanchez’s perspective, retention and graduation rates in higher education are rooted in how students are educated in high school.

“Part of the reason retention is a big issue is that a lot of students who come from lower income communities come from high schools that aren’t anywhere near the performance of other high schools. The programs are day and night,” Sanchez said. “Even if you have a really smart kid going to a low-income school, they’re going to show up to college and struggle a lot more than others.”

The GoldShirt program in the BOLD Center is one way the College of Engineering is tackling that hurdle, according to Braun.

Students are eligible for the GoldShirt program if they want to enroll in the college but need additional academic preparation before starting their degree programs.

The five-year program includes academic preparation as well as a focus on community building, leadership and personal development.

Nahum Tariku was hesitant about the GoldShirt program at first, mainly because he didn’t like the idea of living in a residence hall past the mandatory freshman year. GoldShirt students are required to live in a specific residence hall for three years.

Now a junior studying electrical and computer engineering, Tariku credits the program with helping him thrive at CU Boulder.

“It’s played a really vital role in my success here, even just me surviving here,” he said, laughing. “I was pretty sad when I found out you have to live in the dorms for the first three years, but I realized how impactful it was to go to that dorm every day and see people who looked like me and had the same background as me, who had similar family struggles or who were also just trying to get adjusted.”

Whenever he would start feeling overwhelmed by the workload, being around students he met during the program’s summer introduction made it feel more manageable. It also helped him connect with more friends and have a life outside of studying, Tariku said.

His peers in the GoldShirt program and BOLD Center also created a place that felt comfortable when he would go into classes where he was the only diverse student.

Growing up in an Ethiopian family and living in Denver, Tariku didn’t have a lot of experience with being the only person of color in a room.

“When I used to hear about being the only person of color in the room and how that felt lonely, I would say, ‘Oh, just make friends and join in.’ But now actually being in that, it’s scary being the only person from a diverse background,” he said. “It feels like a lot of pressure and it also feels like you’re out of place, like they’ve been prepared for this and I haven’t, and it doesn’t feel like you belong there.”

That’s something Braun is trying to tackle in recruiting and retaining more diverse students.

“When high school students and their families come to visit our campus and they walk through our Engineering Center, it’s not just the academics we want to show them,” Braun said. “We want to show them that they belong, that they’ll do well here and that they’re an important part of our overall community.”

Senior Andres Martinez Cancino noticed a big difference when he transferred to CU Boulder’s engineering program from the University of Denver.

In DU’s smaller program, Cancino was one of two Spanish-speaking students.

“When I came to CU it was really nice because the first week I met a bunch of people through the BOLD Center,” he said. “Culturally, it was an easier place to adapt because I met people who had been here for a few years already, so they guided me along the way.”

Cancino is an international student from Monterrey, Mexico, and will graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering and minors in business and entrepreneurship. He wants to get his master’s degree and eventually start a business related to renewable energy and environmental engineering.

Cancino said while he didn’t encounter many barriers because of his background at CU Boulder, he did when he started applying for jobs. At a Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers conference in Kansas, he met recruiters who wouldn’t talk to him because he wasn’t an American citizen.

“That was a huge slap in the face for me, that these big companies would hire Mexican Americans but not international students,” he said. “I’d be talking to companies, like General Motors, and they would like my resume and talk about setting up an interview, but as soon as they saw where I was from, it was over.”

Cancino said he’s thankful for the job search help he’s received from CU Boulder advisers and alumni since then, and for the internships at the Ball Corp. and other companies that have given him a foot in the door.

Overall, Braun said, the improvements in enrolling and retaining diverse students are tied to the ceaseless work by people inside and outside of the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“I’ve never seen a group of faculty and staff who are so committed to our students, and I mean all of our students. They are fully committed to these efforts and they make a difference in little ways every day,” Braun said.

“This is a national and a global issue,” Braun continued. “It’s not just what we’re doing inside the college, it’s the support we’ve gotten from alumni in this effort, from industry partners in the form of scholarships and internships. All of those efforts together have been the rocket fuel in our ship.”