Roe Lecturer Discusses Need to Keep Students on the STEM Path

The 2015 Ralph Coats Roe Medal recipient, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, PhD, was the featured presenter at the ASME Annual Meeting's Ralph Coats Roe Keynote Luncheon on June 7. Dr. Hrabowski has been the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, since 1992.

During his presentation at the Annual Meeting earlier this month, this year’s Ralph Coats Roe Medal recipient, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, PhD, discussed how childhood experiences can directly influence one’s personal and professional life choices later in life. A civil rights crusader who was arrested at the age of 12 for marching in the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, Dr. Hrabowski’s early life as an activist has certainly inspired his current career as a STEM education champion, particularly for minority students.

Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will receive the 2015 Ralph Coe Medal at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition this November. The award recognizes outstanding contributions toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer’s worth to contemporary society.

In addition to serving as president of UMBC since 1992, Hrabowski was selected by President Barak Obama to chair the recently created President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He also chaired the National Academies committee that produced the recent report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation – America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. Hrabowski has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME magazine, one of America’s best leaders by U.S. News and World Report, and recipient of both the Cargenie Corporation’s Academic Leadership Award and the Heinz Award for contributions improving the human condition.

“Whether you know it or not, much of what you do every day has been influenced by things that happened to you as a child,” Hrabowski said toward the beginning of his dynamic and thought-provoking presentation. “I was privileged to grow up in an educated home with old-fashioned values involving religion and faith, and two hard-working parents who constantly were talking to me about my future. I’ll never forget spending time during that civil rights period — of going through a peaceful demonstration, of spending time in jail with Dr. King — because I wanted a better education. And I remember the most important lessons of all: To never allow myself to be considered a victim, to always believe in the highest possible standards, and to not allow other people to define who I am.

(Left to right) Susan Skemp, chair of the ASME Foundation's board of directors, Ralph Coats Roe Medalist Freeman Hrabowski, III, ASME Executive Director Thomas Loughlin, and Immediate Past President J. Robert Sims at the presentation of the Roe Medal Certificate at the keynote luncheon.

“It never occurred to me that one day I could possibly be president of a university that has students from 150 countries,” he continued. “I could never have imagined standing here today receiving such an award because, first of all, when I graduated from high school, I had never met an engineer. I didn’t know it was possible to become an engineer. I didn’t know what an engineer did.”

Hrabowski did understand and enjoy mathematics, however — an interest passed on from his parents, who were teachers, and fostered by a school principal who was also a mathematician. “I knew what I wanted to do all my life — and that was to teach math,” he said “I’ve always loved and gotten goosebumps doing math. I learned one day that at the base of engineering was math and physics. I loved physics — I was a physics minor. I said, ‘These engineers must be okay. They like math, too.’ In later years I began to understand more and more about the engineering.”

As president of a prominent research university, Hrabowski is fully aware of the difficulty keeping both pre-college and university students on a STEM career path. Although the percentage of college educated people in the United States has risen from 10 percent in the early 1960s to 30 percent today, a challenge remains.

“I chaired the National Academy’s Committee on STEM,” he said. “Only 5 percent of 24 year olds in America have college degrees in STEM. In Europe, it’s actually 10 percent. And here’s the biggest news, the fact is two-thirds of (students) in this country who begin with a major in STEM will leave it within the first two years, and, quite frankly, everybody says it’s a K-12 problem. What we saw in the data was this: The higher the test scores, the more prestigious the university, often the greater the probability the student leaves within the first two years. They move from the sciences to something that’s non-quantitative, because in America we think of the first two years of STEM as weed out courses. So the question becomes, ‘What are the things we can do to be creative to help more students to have the kinds of experiences that will lead to more students... to have careers in those fields?”

Deanne Bell (left), founder of ASME's recent Future Engineers 3D Space Challenge partnership with NASA and member of the ASME Foundation's board of directors, and Sydney Vernon, the junior winner of the inaugural Future Engineers Challenge, during a discussion of the ASME Foundation's STEM education initiatives that followed Dr. Hrabowski's presentation.

And while he left educators in the audience to ponder that problem, Hrabowski presented what he saw as the very biggest problem facing not only the United States, but the world: inequality. “I want you to think about how you can help the bottom quarter in our society,” not only in terms of job creation, but in getting disadvantaged students interested in becoming educated, he said. Engineers need to participate and “help in solving the problems,” he added. “Not as technicians, but as thought leaders.”

Hrabowski's presentation was followed by program highlighting the various STEM-related educational outreach programs currently being sponsored by the ASME Foundation, which also supports the Ralph Coats Roe Medal and Luncheon. Noha El-Ghobashy, executive director of the ASME Foundation, introduced a short video featuring footage from the recent ASME Innovation Showcase (IShow) in Pune, India. Deanne Bell, founder of ASME’s recent Future Engineers 3D Space Challenge partnership with NASA and member of the ASME Foundation’s board of directors, then hosted a discussion with three participants in recent ASME Foundation-sponsored STEM programs: recent graduate Jaimie Nagode, recipient of 2014-2015 Kenneth Andrew  Roe Scholarship; Sydney Vernon, the junior winner of the inaugural Future Engineers 3D Space Challenge; and Raymond Tran, a math teacher who has been integrating the new ASME INSPIRE curriculum into his classroom at Joseph Cavallaro Middle School in Brooklyn, N.Y.