The state’s university system has overlooked female and minority students when encouraging secondary education students to enroll in science and technology majors, teachers from across the state said yesterday in a summit to boost enrollment in engineering programs.
The gathering of teachers, professors and administrators from schools across the state, as well as government and business officials, is probably the first in a string of task forces and work sessions to link university students with their future employers and expose secondary students to the research conducted at the university, said university President Dan Mote, who hosted the summit.
Many of the problems that keep students out of engineering programs – misconceptions that the work is not practical, stereotypes that engineers are boring and students not understanding the multitude of jobs available to them – must be dealt with at the local level and are too complicated to solve in one session, Mote said.
Parents and the larger culture don’t encourage women and minorities to consider studying engineering, and schools do little to counteract the message, panelists said.
Long-standing funding shortages for laboratory space and a failure to attract students who transfer from community colleges have also plagued the programs, teachers said.
“My institution turns away hundreds of students every semester who are interested in majoring in biology because we don’t have the laboratory space,” said Judy Ackerman, vice president and provost of Montgomery College in Rockville.
While the college finally secured enough money from the state to build a new facility, construction won’t begin for about three and a half years, Ackerman said. Students from western Maryland and the Eastern Shore are underrepresented in the engineering programs, teachers said.
Mote’s Chief of Staff Ann Wylie, who is also a geography professor, said the explosion of students’ interest in the university’s life sciences programs, such as biology and chemistry, is due to recent events that make the subjects seem glamorous – cyclist Lance Armstrong’s recovery from testicular cancer and the mapping of the human genome, for example. Children in school must be shown the interesting projects an education in engineering can lead to, she said.
Contact reporter Kate Campbell at campbelldbk@gmail.com.
