Student and Faculty Retention

Retention efforts for faculty and students that are underrepresented in computing are important for recruitment and education purposes. This page has resources for student and faculty retention, recommendations on how to use retention to guide and improve BPC efforts, and resources to include in a plan.

Actions To Take

Below are recommendations – improving department environment and policies; providing mentorship and networking opportunities; and improving curriculum and pedagogy; and corresponding resources that can be used for student and faculty retention.

Improve the Department Environment and Policies for Faculty Retention

  • Adopt practices for inclusive hiring using NCWIT’s advice for inclusive faculty hiring.
  • Use the University of Michigan’s Advance Project for policies and practices related to faculty recruiting, retention, mentoring, annual evaluation and tenure evaluations.
  • Utilize the University of Michigan’s FAQ, which details why faculty choose to leave and what institutions can do to retain them, to improve department policies and retain faculty.
  • Mitigate bias in teaching evaluations by leading faculty meetings about biases and how the department can lessen the impact of those biases on annual evaluations and promotions (Chávez & Mitchell, 2020).
  • Use the institution’s diversity and inclusion resources to teach faculty and staff about BPC. Education related activities should be conducted at faculty meetings, onboarding new researchers or research teams, or when training new TAs. NCWIT’s essay about the importance of BPC is a useful resource for educational purposes.

Provide Mentorship and Networking Opportunities for Faculty and Students

  • Establish an internal mentorship program using structures provided by the University of Michigan’s report on providing and receiving mentorship and advice, specifically for supporting new faculty.
  • Identify and recruit external senior mentors for new junior faculty. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County invites senior academics to serve as mentors to junior faculty through their Eminent Scholar Mentoring Program, which can help faculty build their network of mentors, collaborators, and sponsors.
  • Fund travel to conferences and computing specific career workshops – CMD-IT workshops, CRA workshops, and bootcamp and coaching. Allowing students to attend conferences and career workshops allows them to create community amongst other students, the wider computing community, and potential mentors.
  • Allow the establishment of on-campus affinity groups. NCWIT’s tips to avoid common pitfalls and sustain affinity groups. The resource is specific to Women in Computing (WIC) groups, but the cautions and recommendations are relevant for all affinity groups.
  • Partner with BPC related affinity groups, NSBE, SACNAS, SWE, ACM-W, NSBC, to build community amongst students who are underrepresented in computing.

Improve Curriculum and Pedagogy for Student Retention

  • Use strategies for small, impactful changes to homework assignments to highlight how and why students are learning course content.
  • Adopt peer-reviewed homework assignments. The Engage CS Edu project hosts peer-reviewed homework assignments for use in CS0, CS1, Data Structures, and Discrete Math.
  • Revise introductory courses if they require prior CS knowledge. Students who are underrepresented in CS because of their race or ethnicity are less likely to have access to a CS course at their high school (Scott, et al., 2017). In addition, more men than women have taken an AP CS class in high school (Lim & Lewis, 2020).
  • Pedagogy describes teaching methods. A meta-analysis of 225 STEM education research studies compared active learning to lecture-only courses, and determined that students in lecture only sections were 1.5 times more likely to fail (Freeman, et al., 2014). Additionally, minoritized and non-minoritized student groups benefited from active learning. Departments are encouraged to revise lecture content to include Peer Instruction, a method developed by CS education researchers that uses an active learning curriculum for common CS courses.