WASHINGTON, D.C. – Calling it an issue of national competitiveness, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) announced a new bill on Tuesday that seeks to increase the proportion of minority students who graduate with STEM degrees, as well as the number of minority faculty members who teach them.
“When we look at researchers, engineers, we don’t see America, the diversity,” Johnson said Tuesday at a Capitol Hill news conference and roundtable hosted by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering Inc., or NACME.
To illustrate the point, Johnson cited statistics that show only 22.1 percent of Latino students, 18.4 percent of African-American students and 18.8 percent of Native American students in STEM fields complete their degree within five years, versus 33 percent and 42 percent for White and Asian students, respectively.
To help lessen these disparities, Johnson introduced the “Broadening Participation in STEM Education Act”—a bill patterned after similar legislation Johnson has introduced in previous years to increase the level of women who complete STEM degrees.
The Act introduced Tuesday goes further than Johnson’s previous bills to include underrepresented minority groups.
According to a draft of the bill obtained by Diverse, the proposed measure would enable the National Science Foundation to award grants on a competitive basis to colleges and universities for “implementing or expanding reforms in undergraduate STEM education in order to increase the number of students from underrepresented minority groups receiving degrees in these fields, and to recruit, retain and advance STEM faculty members from underrepresented minority groups at institutions of higher education.”
The bill was warmly embraced by higher education leaders that NACME assembled Tuesday for an event titled “Increasing American Competitiveness: A Conversation with Business and the Academy on Broadening Participation in STEM.”
