Earlier this month, President Obama hosted the first-ever White House Demo Day and convened entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, government officials and educators to bring national attention to the practice of inclusive entrepreneurship.
Along with the focus on inclusive entrepreneurship, Demo Day provided a platform for leading technology companies, such as Pinterest, and investors to showcase their commitment to diversity. In addition, engineering deans representing 102 U.S. colleges and universities made public a national pledge to increase diversity among engineering students by building a more representative student pipeline.
Obama said the “deans at America’s engineering schools are committing to recruit and retain more diverse student bodies, building the pipeline for the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs because this is something we are seeing again and again and again.”
“We are not producing all the technical talent, all the engineers that we need. And part of the reason is because too many girls and too many young people of color are getting intimidated and winnowed out of the process, not being mentored, not being encouraged, and we deprive ourselves of the talent that we need in order for us to continue to be a dynamic, innovative economy — because that’s the part of the population that’s growing,” the president told Demo Day attendees.
With his words, Obama echoed the engineering diversity pledge letter that was announced early August and has since gained more than 40 additional signatories in the past three weeks. The letter specifies that engineering schools develop diversity plans, establish at least one K-12 or community college pipeline activity to recruit a more diverse pool of students, and promote partnerships with non-Ph.D.-granting engineering colleges that enroll significant numbers of underrepresented minorities. Lastly, the letter stipulates that engineering schools and colleges “commit to the development and implementation of proactive strategies to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in our faculty.”
Dr. Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, said the diversity pledge represents a leadership push on the part of engineering educators to reinvigorate their efforts at diversifying the engineering profession. As chair of the Engineering Deans Council diversity committee within the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), Yortsos and others took on the task this past spring of organizing engineering deans to take new action on diversity.
“We believe there’s a need to change the conversation about engineering and about STEM in general. These are very important disciplines and areas, and the economic vitality of the country and national security to some degree depends a lot on whether we have a prepared workforce,” Yortsos said.
