Abstract:

A major national problem in the USA is the under-representation of its major minority and ethnic groups in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In particular women and the Hispanic, Afro American, Native American and Native Pacific Islanders are and have been traditionally underrepresented in STEM and more so in computing and information technology. This paper addresses the Challenges in American Higher Education as we move to improve the disparity existing in the obtaining of Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees in the fields of computing and information technology. This disparity is alarming as the representation of Anglos receiving these degrees is significantly higher (200 to 300%) than those received by these minorities. The Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions (CAHSI) a consortium of 8 institutions focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing, is implementing and promoting the development of recruitment and retention mechanisms to attract other majors to the field of Computer Science and persuasion to graduate studies. Computer Science has lost roughly 50% of its majors in the last 5 years. As part of this effort, the member institutions have introduced different interventions that are intended to increase number of under-represented students in computing. CAHSI is creating a repository for support materials for dissemination of each of the implementations and collecting data to determine the success of the approaches. This paper discusses how the Minority Serving Institutions Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions and other similar efforts such as Cyber-infrastructure Empowerment Coalition are implementing 'best practices' to improve the situation.

Keywords:

cahsi, innovation, computer science, minority institutions, undergraduate students.