Sunday, February 9, 2020
Research Blog #1
For my final paper I wanted to focus on diversity at colleges. This can go a number of ways. For example, I can talk about what colleges are doing to try to promote diversity at their campuses; or I can talk about the reason why there are not many minorities going to colleges when compared to other students. However, I want to write about diversity amongst different majors. In my personal experience as a math major, I have noticed the dynamic of people in my upper level math classes are much different than that of my SAS elective classes. My paper will talk about why this is.
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There has been an explosion of interest in the question of campus diversity over the past few years, because there is strong evidence that diversity is declining at the majority of schools, both public and private, due in part to the rising costs of college. There was a special issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education devoted to "Diversity" in August of 2019, and you can access it from a Rutgers computer, as Rutgers provides free access on campus to The Chronicle:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/Diversity/249
I also saw a very recent book titled Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender, edited by Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson (Rutgers UP 2020) which "describes the racist and sexist structures that impede underrepresented groups from focusing their studies on science, technology, engineering, and math, and suggests a way forward."
Over the years, several students in this class have written about ways of supporting women in STEM fields, and many of their arguments are probably quite similar to those that could be applied to supporting other underrepresented groups:
http://cortescollege201.blogspot.com/
http://erinelizabethlynch.blogspot.com/
http://maryalicehauer.blogspot.com/
Several students have pointed to the example set by Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, who worked to revamp the curriculum there to make STEM majors (especially computer science) more amenable to female students, who say they are interested in majoring in STEM fields at the same rate as male students but who end up majoring in STEM at much lower rates. Probably some of Klawe's interventions would help other underrepresented students as well -- especially a de-emphasis on the "gatekeeping" function of introductory classes, which tend to favor students who have had the strongest preparation, especially in math, and disadvantage other students, especially those who went to under-resourced schools.