Hi there, I was curious about how you were able to make corporate connections for your project. Sounds very exciting, and very important.

Hi Peter. I enjoyed your video and it was wonderful seeing leaders from so many organizations sharing the important vision of increasing the number of URM students in engineering. Would you be able to describe some of the proposed activities for reaching the 50K goal, as well as describe some of the "shared measurement metric strategies" of the project? Also, as 2025 is far away, how will you know you're on track for meeting the target goal? Thanks.

Hi Peter!  I enjoyed hearing the individuals in the video speak so passionately about their interest in working with one another toward this goal.  I went to your website to learn more about your shared metrics. I was particularly interested in the K-12 metrics since they are an important precursor to your metric that focuses on high school graduates interested in engineering. The website provides a source, but I'm curious to know more about the specific K-12 metrics you are looking at?

Hello Jeanne,

The specific K-12 metrics are:

• AP Calculus Completion, i.e., the number of high school seniors who have completed AP Caculus, disaggregated by gender, race, and ethnicity; and
• High School Graduates, i.e., the annual number of high school students earning a diploma with an expressed interest in majoring in engineering, disaggregated by gender, race, and ethnicity.

 Thanks for the feedback!

Peter, I was fascinated by your project.  You've used the collective impact approach in powerful ways. It would be important to share the journey of building a coalition. That is often messy.  You seemed to be well on your way.  

How long have you been working together? What are your next steps?

Hi Janice, 

The backbone organizations (or "leadership circle") started having initial discussions about the project in early 2015. (Together the leadership circle organizations have something 80,000+ members.) NSBE, SHPE, SWE, and AISES convened initially to compare notes on the graduation rates and try to identify some points of collaboration on how we could collectively change the numbers. This lead to the larger conception of the 50K and using the collective impact model, which as you note can be quite messy. During the last two years we've had a project plan (our project pre-dates the INCLUDES grant) and two project managers/facilitators (one of which is Gabe, a co-presenter for the video). Additionally, we have check-in meetings and webinars on a monthly basis. In recruiting partners for the 50K coalition, we identified universities with engineering programs that graduated members of our organizations. Our corporate and professional association partners are organizations that have a proven commitment to the goals of the 50K coalition. The next major milestone will be to convene the 40 coalition partners next month to check-in on our progress and begin to lay out the work we have done in collecting everyone's best practices/data in "moving the needle" - increasing the graduation numbers of women and under represented minorities within engineering. Next month we'll also take feedback in forum discussions from participating organizations to see where we might need to course correct.

Peter, the group has given good attention implementing the collective impact approach.  Thank you for your detailed response.  I had another question that I forgot to ask.  Why is AP calculus the only STEM class used for consideration?  Could another high level STEM  class provide the same info?

Janice

Peter, I wish you all the best in this work.

Janice