Hispanic American Undergraduate Degrees in Computer Science

There was a very strong presence of technology companies at the inspiring 2022?Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE)?convention in?Charlotte.?This past week rekindled my interest in checking out the progress for Hispanic Americans in attaining Computer Science degrees. I have also previously written on?African American degree recipients in Computer Science.??This is a follow-on to a post on?Aerospace Engineering?for Hispanic Americans. I mentioned with that post that aerospace companies don’t just hire Aerospace Engineers – like many companies, they hire from many fields, including computing. SHPE also extends membership to students from a broad range of STEM disciplines, and SHPE is welcoming to all. For a more scholarly perspective on participation, persistence, retention and graduation rates in Computer Science, check out the excellent publication by?Lunn et al.

The field of Computer Science (CS) has undergone stunning growth at all levels across the past decade, as shown in Figure 1. Data included here uses the?ASEE?database and includes submitted data for computer science programs inside and outside of engineering colleges.??Programs that may not be included in this data are computer science programs at institutions without an engineering school.??The data is likely broadly representative, but many computer science programs at institutions without an engineering college do not have doctoral degrees.??

Growth in CS degrees across the past decade is tremendous at all degree levels.??More than double the number of MS degrees and more than four times as many BS degrees, and fifty-percent more PhD degrees were reported in 2021 versus 2012. Diversity in terms of underrepresented minorities and gender has?improved slowly overall.?This post is focused on degree trends for female and male Hispanic Americans in CS, and the growth of degrees earned by Hispanic Americans compared to the overall growth in CS degrees.

Figure 1 shows CS degree production at the BS, MS and PhD degree levels for the past ten years using ASEE data.??

Figure 2 shows Hispanic American CS degree production for BS degrees by gender. The fraction of Hispanic American CS degrees from US institutions has risen from about 4% to 10.1% across the past decade. Those increases for Hispanic Americans were driven by a nearly five times increase in male CS degree recipients and a more than seven times increase in female CS degree recipients. That has resulted in an improvement in the gender diversity within Hispanic American degree recipients from 12.6% to 18.2%. That still lags CS BS degrees overall which consisted of nearly 21% female graduates by 2021.??For data with a lot more detail and a particular focus on graduate degrees, check out the data from the?Computing Research Association, which collects and shares extensive data.

Figure 2 Female and Male Hispanic American CS BS degrees since 2012 based on ASEE data.

On the Data?Careful review of individual academic programs wherein I know the students and faculty suggests that the reporting of some singular demographic groups, including Hispanic Americans, may be?underreported?from a combination of personal choice when filling out forms as well as institutional practice and interpretation. The data presented?here depends on information?reported by academic institutions. It also depends on?individual?self-reports to those institutions on race and ethnicity, which can be challenging for simple data analysis?since?Hispanic Americans, like everyone, can choose whether or not to be identified by their ethnicity. They also can choose to be defined as African, Asian, Caucasian, multiple races or?choose no race at all. The newer category of "Two or more races" and folks not declaring their race and/or ethnicity so?that they are "Unknown" may also reduce precision compared to some other types of data. Other smaller demographic groups used by ASEE such as Native Americans/American Indian and Pacific Islander vary considerably?year-to-year making it difficult to note any trends or make cogent conclusions except that their numbers are small. Individual states like California also collect a broader range of?data fields. Anyone attempting to report to databases on this type of data also runs into a number of other difficulties. For example, the?National Center for Education Statistics has previously recommended listing undocumented students as “Unknown” rather than listing them by race/ethnicity. One exception has been for students declared by the Department of Homeland Security as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who are to be listed as foreign nationals.?

Errors in presentation of the data here are entirely on me.??Any opinions expressed here are entirely my own and not those of my employer. If you think there is something I missed or I made a mistake - send me a direct message and I will correct it. Keith J Bowman ?2022.