Summer Camps Bring STEM to a Wider Audience

Plenty of first-year computer-science majors never make it to the second year, and as a black woman, Latéjah Whittaker may seem at particular risk. Both women and African-Americans are vastly underrepresented in the tech sector.

But as her first semester at California State University at Northridge nears an end, Ms. Whittaker says she’s never been more convinced that the major is right for her — in part because she’s sailing through her first computer-science course, “Introduction to Java.”

After her freshman year at Castro Valley High School, in the Bay Area, Ms. Whittaker signed up for a free program based at the University of California at Berkeley called Summer Math and Science Honors, or Smash. Ms. Whittaker spent five weeks each summer throughout high school focusing on science and math courses — including a summer after her sophomore year that was devoted largely to studying Java.

Summer STEM Camps No Longer Just for the Affluent

They draw underrepresented high-school women and minorities into rewarding careers. Federal and private grants help keep fees from being an obstacle. And colleges identify standout students for recruiting.

• Priceless Experience for Young Scientists

“I know a lot of the concepts already,” Ms. Whittaker says of her Java course at CSU. “It’s more like a review for me.”

Summer camps like Smash Academy are more popular than ever, driven by a consensus among universities, companies, donors, and policy makers that schools must do a better job of boosting skills in STEM fields.

A generation ago, summer science camps at universities were largely filled by students from affluent families. Today the pool is increasingly diverse, in terms of both race and income — in large part because financial support for the programs is on the rise.

The Smash program is now offered at five university campuses, and will expand to two more in 2018: Wayne State University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The program was started at Berkeley in 2004 by the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit organization with a goal of diversifying employment in the tech sector. In 2015, Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of the institute, and her husband, Mitch Kapor, an entrepreneur who started Lotus Software, committed an additional $6 million over three years to Smash.

The program focuses on low-income students from minority groups that are underrepresented in STEM. At the Berkeley program, which brings in 30 to 40 new students each year, 60 percent are Latino and 30 percent African-American. During three consecutive summers following their freshman year of high school, the students get a strong dose of STEM and entrepreneurship courses at the residential camp, along with instruction on public speaking, and networking opportunities with minority professionals in tech fields. The programming continues during the school year, with Saturday workshops, field trips, and online computer-science classes.

“Smash is a holistic program,” says Eli Kennedy, the Level Playing Field Institute’s chief executive. “Beyond quantitative skills, we want to make sure they have the confidence to be resilient in college and the workplace.”

The program now has 600 alumni. Ninety-three percent of Smash alumni have graduated from college within five years, the institute says, and 55 percent have earned degrees in STEM.

Philanthropy has also helped expand the number of low-income and minority students who attend Summer STEM, a six-week program for high-school sophomores and juniors at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York City. The Pinkerton Foundation and the Henry Sterne Trust contributed a combined $90,000 for the summer program in 2017, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation donated $124,000 for a related program that provides free engineering education for high-school students on Saturdays during the school year.

George Delagrammatikas, professor of mechanical engineering and director of Cooper’s STEM outreach programs, says the grants have made it possible for him to seek new students by reaching out to counselors, teachers, and principals in lower-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, Northern Manhattan, and Brooklyn. Last summer Cooper Union provided a full scholarship to 95 students in the STEM camp, up from about 65 students five years ago. The program, which attracts over 200 students per year, has a price tag of $3,250.

The students can choose among various tracks, such as robotics, biomedical and genetic engineering, and race-car design. The summer program also functions as a recruiting tool for the college, according to Mr. Delagrammatikas. About 3 percent of the most recent group of engineering applicants attended the STEM camp while in high school.

“Familiarity breeds respect,” he says. “The students at Summer STEM get to know what we’re about.”

Federal research agencies may deserve the most credit for the rising number of low-income students attending STEM summer camps. For the past 20 years, the National Science Foundation has based grant decisions on the “broader impacts” of proposed research, in addition to the merits of the research itself. Since 2013, NSF has required grant applicants to spell out exactly what those broader impacts are.

That’s led to a boom in summer STEM opportunities for students — often in the very labs of the researchers getting those federal grants. Dozens of top research institutions, including Baylor, Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford, have created summer research programs that allow high-school students to work alongside professors and graduate students on academic research.

Other federal agencies are also providing support — and not just at elite campuses. In 2015, Bowie State University and 12 other historically black institutions won a $25-million grant to build a stronger pipeline of minority students entering cybersecurity careers. Bowie State used its $1.5-million share of the grant to create a five-week summer program in cybersecurity for about 40 students each summer.

The participants in the camp come from Baltimore’s YouthWorks, an employment program for young people. The program provides a stipend, a free lunch, and free train tickets for the hourlong ride from Baltimore to the Bowie campus. The camp is led by two computer-science faculty members, Lethia Jackson and Velma Latson, who are helped by several undergraduates majoring in computer technology. The YouthWorks students learn about cybersecurity terminology, job opportunities in the field, and how to design websites using HTML and JavaScript.

“Then students divide into teams and come up with an innovative web-design project that aims to solve an issue in their community,” Ms. Jackson says.

At the end of the camp, students present their projects in a competition judged by a group of technology experts. Some of the students use the skills they acquire to find work building websites for companies back in Baltimore, but about three per year enroll at Bowie as undergraduates, including one woman this fall who received a full scholarship because of her strong grades and test scores.

Some camps that do not receive much grant support nevertheless try to make it possible for low-income students to participate. Northern Illinois University, which will offer four weeklong overnight STEM camps to high-school students in 2018, will use its revenue surplus from 2017 to provide financial aid to students next summer. The camps cost $680 per week, and allow students to pursue tracks like coding, engineering, and video-game design.

Many of the summer camps also work on soft skills, to help low-income and minority students gain confidence that they can succeed — and the resilience to hang in when times get tough.

Ms. Whittaker, the Smash alumna, says the program’s networking nights with minority IT professionals helped her visualize a spot for herself in the industry, even though the typical student in her Cal State Java class is white and male.

“It was really important for me to go through that,” Ms. Whittaker says. “As a woman of color going into computer science, I knew there wouldn’t be a lot of people who looked liked me, so having developed a network of people who do look like me — that’s something I can fall back on.”

More camps are also trying to track their alumni through college and into their work careers to see if the early exposure to STEM pays off. At Cooper Union, part of the grant from the Sloan foundation will be used to hire a researcher to conduct a longitudinal study of what happens to the alumni of its STEM outreach programs.

“When we see a fourth-grade girl show up to STEM day, does she come back years later for Summer STEM?” Mr. Delagrammatikas says. “Twenty years from now, will she be a Ph.D.? That’s what we want to know.”

Correction (12/4/2017, 11:50 a.m.): This article originally said that 10 percent of Cooper Union’s most recent freshman class had attended its Summer STEM program. The correct statistic is 3 percent of engineering applicants, and the text has been updated.