A Program to Broaden Participation in Computing Majors

Mississippi State University (MSU), like many other institutions across the country, has seen a significant decline in the number of computing majors since the early 2000's when the Dot Com crash caused many students to shy away from majors involving computing. In addition, the diversity of the students who have remained in the field has decreased in two ways. First, female students make up a smaller percentage of majors in these fields. Second, the percentage of underrepresented minorities has decreased significantly. Therefore, MSU's computing departments (Management and Information Systems, Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering) combined forces in 2010 to propose an NSF funded Broadening Participation in Computing program that would work with the state's large community college system to recruit more students into these computing related majors at MSU. This program received funding in the spring of 2010 and has run two successful Summer Computing Experience programs for this targeted group. This paper presents an overview of the program components and discusses the assessment results so far for the program.