Student Involvement and Early Preparation: A Recipe for Minority Student Success

Being a female, first generation Mexican-American student that started off as an Aerospace Engineering major here at CalPoly, two articles spoke to my experience as a life-long student: Raymond Landis’s “The Case for Minority Engineering Programs” and Shirley McBay’s “Improving Education for Minorities”.

Both of these articles were written in the late 1980s, around the time I was born, yet approximately two decades later I find some of their recommendations and insights still timely and relevant.

As I see it, Landis concerns himself not only with the discussion of recruitment of minorities into college engineering programs, but also with the issue of retention. The “attrition”, or loss, of minority college students at white engineering schools can be addressed by examining “the educational environment that our predominantly white schools present to minority students” (756). Landis wants to know why despite good pre- indicators of success in college such as SAT scores, GPA, high level math and science courses taken( 756), minority students still perform less impressively than their white counterparts. Landis focuses on the educational environment, and suggests that increasing student involvement is the key to retention and success.

I find Landis’s suggestion to be beneficial, but it is lacking another aspect that impacts minorities’ success; what needs to be accounted for is the psycho-social impact of the change in demographic environment that minority students undergo on the way from high school to college. Speaking from personal experience, I graduated from a high school where I was able to take a reasonable number of AP classes and graduated number 15 in my class, AND it was also a high school were at least more than 95% of students were Latino/a. To go from that kind of cultural surrounding to a “white engineering school” as Landis could most certainly apply to CalPoly, is staggering.

I believe that Landis is on the right path in offering student involvement as a solution to retention and success in college, as, in reading his article, I felt all his observations about why I feel like I am falling behind apply to me (i.e. amount of time spent on campus, interaction with faculty, participation in student organizations, interaction with other students, etc.) While I agree with Landis, I feel that the particular brand of “involvement” he is promoting lacks a sense of integration. By integration I mean fostering an interaction between minority and non-minority students and faculty. Landis lauds the Multicultural Engineering Program (MEP), which I agree is commendable, but we must not forget that college is a stepping stone to success in the professional world, where cultural isolation is not something for which we are aiming. Student involvement should take on the role of bridging feelings of “otherness”, and lend an opportunity for minority students to find a place within the larger student population. Also, it is important to note that minority students are not just defined by their cultural identity but by their interests as well, and I think that should also be an important aspect to foster.

I feel that Mc Bay’s article addresses Landis’s isolated focus on postsecondary education, as Landis states that we should dispel the “myth of preparation”, the preparation undertaken in K-12 education. While I feel it is right to concentrate on how university environments have historically impeded minority student success, Mc Bay offers that “interventions should occur at the earliest possible time” (37). I feel this argument only makes sense, because education is a cumulative process, and success in college is dictated in great part by this preparation. This preparation requires extra help to address potential lacks in a minority student’s experience. For example, a minority student is more likely to be a first generation college student, and since their parents cannot provide their own experience for how to navigate their children’s advance in education, pre-emptive counseling programs such as MIT’s Minorities Introduction to Engineering and Science Program help fill the void.

Lastly, Landis talks about student-faculty interaction as a component of a successful student’s involvement, however, he also notes that faculty that are non-minority can sometimes be a source of discouragement for minority students. I feel McBay addresses this problem by suggesting that we “redouble our efforts to recruit more minority teachers” (39) and this starts precisely in K-12 education, where “we must seek out and nurture minority students with the talent and interest to become teachers” (ibid).

I believe between Landis’s and McBay’s suggestions, we have a start for ensuring minorities’ success in the educational system as well as the professional world.

Works Cited

Landis, Raymond B. "The Case for Minority Engineering Programs." Engineering Education (1988): 756-61.
McBay (1989), “Improving Education for Minorities.”