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The overall objective of this project funded by the NSF-IUSE program is to employ a sociotechnical systems lens and framework and identify and evaluate organization-wide capacities and change catalysts in a predominantly white institution's college of engineering. The college of engineering is viewed as a sociotechnical organization with social and technical subsystems. The social subsystem models who talks to whom about what. The technical subsystem models the main activities and programs in the organization. Our project aims to: (1) assess the technical system’s capacity to support recruitment and retention through a technical system analysis; (2) assess the social system’s capacity to support recruitment and retention through a social system analysis; and (3) generate systemwide catalysts for URM student success. We conducted semi-structured hour-long interviews with 38 stakeholders including students, faculty, administrators and staff from various departments and student organizations within and outside the college. We are qualitatively analyzing the interview data to identify technical and social system barriers and enablers. Data analysis is ongoing, but our preliminary findings and insights are as follows: (1) social system barriers for URM students were interactions with peers in classroom environment (leading to a sense of isolation and a lack of belonging), interactions with faculty and staff especially in relating to their needs and being empathetic, and familial concerns and being able to support their family financially. (2) interactions with their friends was the top social system enabler for URM students. Family also provided them comfort and solace while attending to the rigors of college. They also felt that living at home would alleviate some of the financial burdens they faced. (3) the lack in numbers (and hence the lack of diversity and identity), curricular and instructional methods, and high school preparation were cited as the most important technical system barriers these students faced. (4) students identified as technical system enablers the professional development opportunities they had, their participation in students organizations, particularly in identity-based organizations such as NSBE, SHPE and WISE, and how that helped them forge new contacts and provided emotional support during their stay here. (5) there is recognition among the administrators and the staff working with URM students that diversity is important in the student body and that the mission of enabling URM student success is important, although the mission itself with respect to URM students is somewhat poorly defined and understood. 

In this paper, we present the Systems Engineering Initiative for Student Success (SEISS) framework we are developing for enabling educational organizations to scan, evaluate and transform their operations to achieve their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in student recruitment, retention, and graduation. The underlying structure and logic in our SEISS framework is that an organization such as a college of engineering is a sociotechnical system (STS) consisting of a social subsystem and a technical subsystem. The social subsystem consists of people, their roles and is a model of who talks to whom about what. The technical subsystem consists of all the activities, programs, policies, and operations that help the organization achieve its goals. In a sociotechnical system, the social and technical subsystems are interdependent in their functioning, and they must be jointly optimized from an organizational design perspective. Our SEISS framework which views a college or a similar organizational unit as a sociotechnical system lends the organizational designer a unique systems lens with which to view, analyze and design the operations and organize the capacities and resources in the college. The systems lens views an organizational unit, its sub-systems, components, and its corresponding capacities not in isolation, but as entities that interact with each other. With support from an NSF IUSE grant, we have been developing the SEISS framework and have piloted the framework in a predominantly white college of engineering to identify existing and potential technical and social system capacities for underrepresented minority (URM) students to succeed in the college. Preliminary results from our qualitative analyses of URM student interviews reveal the utility of the SEISS framework and the STS lens in unearthing the barriers and enablers for these students in the social and technical subsystems in the college. We also model the interactions between the social and technical subsystem elements in the SEISS framework, revealing latent opportunities for leveraging the connections between the social and technical subsystem capacities and resources. 

Engineering faculty, staff and administrators routinely implement diversity initiatives, yet we know little about their challenges. To address this gap, we consider the perspectives of administrators (deans and department chairs), faculty and staff in one college of engineering at a predominantly White institution (PWI). We ask the following questions: How do engineering education employees tasked with doing diversity work understand their roles? What structural barriers do they encounter in this work? We draw on interviews to better understand their views and experiences as they relate to this institution’s efforts to recruit, retain and graduate undergraduate underrepresented minority students. In our view, for diversity and equity outcomes to be successful, we must extend our focus beyond students to understand how engineering educators do diversity work within their institutions. 

Academic institutions in the US have recently refocused their attention on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This panel consisting of engineering faculty, administrators and industry professionals will discuss how colleges of engineering can approach the problem of recruiting, retaining, and graduating undergraduate underrepresented minority (URM) students by using a sociotechnical systems modeling approach. The main thrust of the discussion is how an academic organizational system such as a college of engineering can be broken down into a social system consisting of the people (students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders), and a technical system consisting of programs and initiatives for URM student success. Joint analyses of the social system and the technical system can then reveal systemwide barriers and opportunities for enabling URM student success.