CONNECTING ACADEMICALLY TALENTED URMS TO A PATHWAY THAT RECRUITS, RETAINS AND GRADUATES GEOSCIENTISTS FOR STEM CAREERS AND AMERICAN WORKFORCE

The national indicators regarding geoscience workforce make it strikingly apparent that it is amongst the least diversified field when race, ethnicity and even gender are considered as compared to other major scientific and engineering fields. Furthermore, the indicators foresee a huge employment vacuum arising not only in STEM but also in the geosciences. To meet the national urgency for STEM graduates one must look outside the boundaries of traditional students and look deep into the underrepresented communities. It gets even harder to recruit URMs into the Geosciences as it is a discovery science which is true for all races across the country. In general, if 100 degrees are awarded in two fields, degree earned ratio between these fields, Engineering and Geosciences would be 95:5 (for all races) and 98:2 amongst (African Americans); In the decade (2001-2010), a dismal 539 or 2% of earth science degrees were earned by the blacks (NSF). Fort Valley State University (FVSU) in its effort to create race and gender parity in geosciences, partnered with its dual degree universities, Penn State University, University of Texas, Austin, University of Arkansas, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of Oklahoma have attracted/recruited, retained and successfully transferred and graduated 40 minority and female geoscientists till present with one third of the graduates coming from the precollegiate summer pipeline program. The summer program’s engineering to geosciences ratio is 60:40 clearly showing the importance these summer programs play for recruitment of minorities. One of the avenues to address the shortage of geoscientists is to emulate and replicate FVSU’s efforts as a national model.