How Preparing for Preschool Reveals Inequality of Opportunity and Diversity Deficiency

A local children’s center is offering a 4-week course to help parents find the perfect preschool for their children. They recommend that all parents begin considering their child’s education before age 2. Does this sound excessive to anyone else? The unfortunate truth is that my wife and I are considering attending the course, though our child is only 18 months old. Let me explain.

Long before we even considered having children, my wife and I proudly put down roots in Chicago by buying a nice two-bedroom condo on the border of the classy Old Town neighborhood. We were pleased to get our place for $100,000 less than similar properties just a few blocks away. In retrospect, the deal may not have been as good as advertised. You see, our neighborhood school is ranked around 250 out of 300 Chicago public elementaries. The rate of violence at the school is also ostensibly high. Meanwhile, the school on the other side of the proverbial tracks is solidly in the top 5.

We live just blocks from some of the most expensive homes in the city, but a number of public housing developments are located within the boundaries of our neighborhood elementary school. Eighty percent of the students in our school come from families living below the poverty line. Still, our neighborhood should by no means be considered the slums of the city. It’s just that any parents of means send their kids to private school, move into another district, or prep their children so they can test into one of the city’s magnet schools. Yes, you can test into kindergarten. Although we complain about the options, we realize that many of our neighbors’ children will not have the same opportunities as our daughter because of their parents’ income. The inequality of opportunity is hard to overlook in the city’s public school system.

Several progressive thinkers have recently published books about why people succeed and how inequality restricts success for too many Americans. Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph E. Stiglitz (2012) demonstratively titled his book The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. The price of inequality is felt by society both in the cycle of poverty that is perpetuated and in the missed opportunity to engage more diverse minds in creative and innovative pursuits.

Civil engineering is not immune to the diversity deficiency. Economic barriers to quality schools and cultural aversion to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) limit the pool of potential engineers. Meanwhile, the ranks of engineers are filled by a privileged class of students who often share the same socioeconomic status and sometimes even the surnames of the previous generation. Up-and-coming engineering leaders will not have succeeded on their own. The cumulative effort of their forebears will have provided an overwhelming career boost. The resulting diversity deficiency endangers the ability of the profession to provide innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing engineering challenges.

In 2011 two surveys were commissioned by Waggener Edstrom Worldwide and Microsoft to evaluate perceptions about STEM education in America (Harris Interactive 2011). The results included some demographic information about students enrolled in STEM programs. Thirty-seven percent of these students had at least one parent working in a STEM field. I had expected the number to be even larger based on my own informal survey of colleagues, so it’s worth considering whether those students are more likely to stick with their STEM major, graduate, and find work in their field. Even though their parents may have pursued other careers, 73% of all students reported that their parents were at least somewhat influential in their career choice. Much of that positive influence may have derived from help with homework, on which parents with STEM careers were significantly more confident to offer help (68% versus 43%). Although outliers are sure to exist, having a well-educated parent in the same field provides a built-in advantage to pursuing an engineering career.

Recalling my own background, I might have been considered one of the outliers. My father is a farmer, and my mother is an educator. However, their commitment to my education and their capacity to assist in my studies in fact place me among the ranks of the privileged. Unlike most other farm kids that I knew, I was spared from working long hours on the farm. I spent my free time exploring numerous extracurricular activities and was offered a scholarship owing in part to those pursuits. In a weird way, I actually succeeded by not working as hard.

In a best seller titled Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (2008), the myth of the harder working “self-made man” is exposed. From Canadian hockey players to Bill Gates, Gladwell illustrated how small quirks of fate can alter careers. For example, it turns out that a disproportionally large number of professional hockey players are born in the first few months of the year. It’s simply a consequence of the cutoff age for Canadian youth hockey leagues. The older, more mature kids tend to outshine their younger peers and are therefore chosen for more elite squads with better coaching and longer schedules. The reader is left to wonder how so much potential talent is overlooked.

One of the most compelling stories in Outliers is the personal narrative of the author himself. He is the son of a Jamaican psychotherapist and a British professor. The book recounts the twists of fate that enabled his Jamaican mother to study in England. The most disturbing of these twists was the family’s good fortune to have light enough skin to rank relatively high in the color-based pseudo-caste system that pervaded Jamaican society well into the twentieth century. This fortune can be tracked back to a plantation owner who purchased a slave to take as his concubine. The story of Gladwell’s mother also includes a rare Commonwealth scholarship, a generous Chinese shopkeeper, and many strong women who valued education as the path to success. Our good fortune is that all these pieces came together so that we could enjoy Gladwell’s popular nonfiction works.

Critics of Gladwell contend that his conclusions are based too much on anecdotal evidence. Experts likewise disagree about the quantifiable benefits of a more diverse workforce, but there is growing consensus that more diverse teams produce better results. Diverse groups appear less susceptible to groupthink tendencies, introduce radically different ideas, and use a broader network (Bishop 2008). I tend to believe that my upbringing on a farm instilled me with a use-what-you’ve-got attitude that has often benefited my project teams.

Like most proud parents, we hope that our daughter will achieve uncommon success in life. Although it may be inconvenient and expensive now, we will pursue a schooling situation that offers her a leg up on the competition, even if that means sitting through a month of Preschool 101. Because of who we are, she will be more likely to pursue a career in science and engineering or in linguistics, her mother’s profession. Whatever her career path, I hope that she will be well served by her own unique personal experience. Growing up and living in a more diverse and equitable world, her potential will be limitless.