A BRIDGE TO THE DOCTORAL PROGRAM STRATEGY FOR INCREASING LATINOS IN THE EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING PROFESSORIATE

摘要

Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. and currently represent about 14.8% of the total U.S. population, making them the largest minority group. Furthermore, National Council of La Raza (NCLR) reports that 23% of children in the US are Latino. Despite these statistics, Latinos are among the most underserved populations in higher education in the U.S., as they have the lowest rate of graduate school enrollment of any racial or ethnic group. Overall, Latinos earn about 4% of the engineering doctorates awarded in the US, and comprise less than 3% of the full time college faculty. For the year 2010, Gibbons reported that engineering degrees for Latinos at the BS, MS, and PhD levels represented 7, 6, and 5.2% respectively of the total number of degrees conferred in the US that year. As Figure 1 illustrates, the percentage of degrees for Latinos have been increasing moderately over the past 10 years, but clearly are still very low and remain disproportionally low compared to the population size that this ethnic group represents. This same reference reports that the percentage of Latino faculty in engineering is also low (about 3.6%), which includes faculty from the two largest engineering programs in Puerto Rico (UPR Mayaguez and Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico).