Increasing Women and Minority Engineering Numbers

The nation's engineering schools, American industry, the Federal government, and a number of philantropic foundations have joined together to help resolve a major U.S. social and economic issue - the lack of women and minority participation in the engineering profession. The challenge has been to increase the number of women and minority graduates from our engineering colleges to the point that parity between ethnic and racial groups is achieved, and the number of women engineers significantly increased. A national time-table of 18 years has been set for achieving the goal of minority parity for incoming freshman students; the clock started running in 1973 and we are now at the five-year midpoint. The program appears to be on schedule; the number of freshman minority students has doubled to about 7,500 during the initial five years. This is good news, but the 1982 entering class will have to have twice again as many minority students if parity is to be approached. This report describes the program at New Mexico State University.