Two leading science and educational advocacy groups set out a strategy Monday for producing more science and engineering graduates by bringing research universities into student-centered alliances with two-year, liberal arts and minority-serving institutions.
The plan essentially calls on colleges from all sectors to work harder at ensuring that students at institutions with few or no science offerings have a lot more options for getting quality science training at nearby campuses.
That idea, along with a series of recommendations for carrying it out, is the focal point of a new report drafted by EducationCounsel and the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the backing of major higher education groups including the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
The plan reflects a realization that existing efforts to improve the nation’s output of science and engineering graduates have focused too narrowly on helping the students, not paying sufficient attention to the institutional structures surrounding them, said Arthur L. Coleman, a managing partner of EducationCounsel, an advocacy group that led the project.
Policymakers often “talk pipeline, pipeline, pipeline” when trying to boost science and engineering performance, said Mr. Coleman, a lawyer who served as an Education Department official in the Clinton administration. Instead, he said, “we should be taking a step back and thinking of better ways to connect institutions.”
The report’s title, “The Smart Grid for Institutions of Higher Education and the Students They Serve,” refers to an electrical “smart grid,” the computer-driven network of power lines that automatically distributes electricity from areas of low priority to places of highest need.
The analogy doesn’t necessarily mean that science and engineering courses should be standardized or fully interchangeable among institutions, leaving no limits on student flow, Mr. Coleman said. But the groups behind the plan believe colleges could do a lot more to replicate some existing strategies and alliances that better enable students from all backgrounds to take science and engineering courses, he said.
Examples cited in the report include the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has an engineering transfer program with 19 other Georgia institutions, including community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other state four-year institutions.
That, said Katherine E. Lipper, a policy and legal adviser at EducationCounsel, allows a student to get “a significant experience at a black college,” such as Morehouse or Spelman, and still enjoy classes at a premier science institution such as Georgia Tech.
Another example, she said, is a program through which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology allows students from nearby liberal-arts colleges to take a lab course.
The idea, which EducationCounsel and the university associations now plan to promote, is that more colleges and universities around the country should look at ways they too can ease the pathways to a science education for students from a variety of settings.
The overall national need has been trumpeted by a series of reports in recent years that project looming shortages of scientists and engineers. The reports were issued by groups that include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Association of American Universities. President Obama and members of his administration have repeatedly amplified those groups’ concern.
The EducationCounsel-led analysis emphasizes the need to address those shortages most directly by attracting more women and minorities. Women and underrepresented minority groups make up about two-thirds of the American work force and they together represent the fastest-growing segments of the nation’s college-age population, it said. Yet, the report said, those groups account for only about a quarter of the U.S. work force in science and engineering fields.
A leading obstacle to the wider adoption of programs such as those at Georgia Tech and MIT is most likely the built-in resistance to change that can be seen among many administrators and faculty, Mr. Coleman said. To some degree, that’s reasonable, as college leaders understandably want to protect the mission and character of their institution, he said.
“There’s no right answer here,” Mr. Coleman said. “This isn’t suggesting every institution tomorrow needs to go out and do this. This is for those institutions that collectively come together and say, ‘You know what? There is a burgeoning national imperative around these issues, and we think we can do more and better, consistent with our mission, consistent with our standards.’”
