At a time when computer science enrollment is declining across the United States, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and IBM (Armonk, NY) have formed a formidable partnership to spark interest in the field among minorities and women. Their idea is to show students across all majors how information technology is relevant to their careers and how familiarity with IT principles and skills will give them a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Unique IT courses at UMass give students hands-on opportunities to better the world around them using IT skills. Such “high-tech nurturing” ignites interest among women in particular.
The showcase program at UMass, now five years old, is the IT Minor. It introduces the IT field to everyone from English majors to students of natural resource conservation.
“We’re not teaching IT for its own sake, but as a means to an end. We’re putting it in context of other things. Students get interested in it because they can see why it matters and that there’s a sense of purpose in it,” says Craig Nicolson, IT Minor chair. “The program gets the IT tools out there and shows students how they can change the world and help people.”
Alumni of the program rave about the IT Minor, and the university is experiencing considerable success in attracting women and minorities. A whopping 40 percent of its graduates with computer science backgrounds are women and minorities, compared to 5 to 8 percent women and 2 percent minorities in CS programs at other universities. The goal is for one in ten graduates to minor in IT.
“Alumni tell us that completing this minor is like taking a semester of language before going to a foreign country. Whatever workplace you go into you’re equipped to speak the language,” Nicolson says. “A survey of our alumni showed they felt the IT minor was a fantastic addition to their major and made a difference in the success of their job searches.”
Closing the IT gap
IBM, the university’s corporate cheerleader, is anxious for more universities in the nation to follow UMass’s lead, says Mark Hanny, IBM’s vice president of strategic partnerships and the IBM executive spearheading the partnership with UMass-Amherst. He’s also an alumnus of the school and was instrumental in getting the IT minor going there.
“IBM surveyed 750 CEOs across the country and found that most see technology as essential to creating a competitive advantage and serving customers. Yet only 20 percent felt they had the employees who had the skills to leverage that technology,” Hanny says.
“What we face in the United States is a serious problem. Because we don’t have enough IT savvy people, a million-and-a-half jobs in the IT industry remain unfilled and many of them move overseas. It’s starting to cause performance problems not only at traditional IT companies, but across all industries,” he adds.
IBM has supported the university in a number of ways. Back in the late 1990s it provided training for faculty. Four years ago the corporation donated hardware and software for a Linux laboratory. The lab was started by Charlie Schweik, a professor of public policy who formerly worked for IBM. Today he helps faculty members from other disciplines use the lab to incorporate IT courses into their particular majors.
IBM also offers the IBM Ambassador program, in which company professionals give supplemental lectures and build curricula for courses like process modeling and supply chain management. This program goes beyond UMass, reaching 8,000 schools and training about 500,000 students nationwide every year.
IT in the community
For UMass’ IT minor, students take six courses in addition to their major requirements. The classes give non-IT majors a strong foundation in underlying IT principles, as well as some software language familiarity, an understanding of how the Internet operates and how data is stored and retrieved, and basic programming skills.
IBM has helped faculty in the nursing school and nine other disciplines across campus develop IT courses. Nicolson teaches a capstone course that groups students in teams of four and sends them to a nonprofit organization in a poor inner-city neighborhood. The students come from a range of disciplines like English, biology and Spanish, and most don’t have a strong computing background. They work with the nonprofit organization to help solve IT-related challenges, like designing a Web site or building an e-mail database. More than 50 percent of the students are women.
Kaimei Zheng is a professor of business marketing in UMass’ School of Management, and the IBM liaison. She helps the faculties of other majors incorporate elements of the IT minor into their own curricula. Zheng teaches two courses in the IT minor: Internet marketing and Internet business design.
Seventy percent of Zheng’s students are enrolled in the IT minor. She notes that half of those taking her Internet marketing course are women.
For her Internet business design class, which she took over from IBM executive and UMass-Amherst alum John Curly, Zheng pairs marketing students with computer science students to work on projects. One requirement of the course is to use IBM e-commerce online business software to build a Web site and write a business plan for a small company in the area. So far ninety-seven companies have benefited.
CAITE gets involved
Working in tandem with UMass and IBM is the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE), launched in March 2007. The alliance focuses on women and minorities that are underrepresented in Massachusetts’ high-tech economy. Recently, the National Science Foundation awarded CAITE a three-year, $1.9 million grant to help attract more women and minorities into computing disciplines.
The effort at UMass has been so successful that it is being replicated at ten schools around the state, points out Alana Wiens, project manager of CAITE.
Hanny is excited about the future of the IT workforce, but cautions, “We need to stay innovative and be the leaders. We have bright people, a lot of resources and wonderful schools and universities. It’s just a question of getting together and working collaboratively,” he says.
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