The founders and charter members of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and our predecessor organizations, in the early 1970s, were part of a generation of African American college students instilled with the need for unity. The expectations of these strivers had been shaped by the partial successes of the Civil Rights Movement, and their visions of true fulfillment had been shaped by proponents of Black Power.
The world was just becoming aware that engineering would be an elite profession, but these dreamers, few in number, already understood that engineering would play a central role in the emerging world economy and that Black people must take an equitable part in that performance. They knew STEM proficiency was needed to realize the organization’s stated goal: “a better tomorrow” for their socioeconomically disadvantaged community and for the nation.
NSBE got its start at Purdue University, where these students met many obstacles head-on, including poor precollege preparation for many and a culture that sought to exclude them from their chosen profession. They immediately made a positive impact. In its first year, the student-led Black Society of Engineers (BSE) saw its tutoring, mentoring, and social engagement efforts increase the retention rate of Black engineering students at Purdue from 20% to 80%.
This marked the beginning of a cultural shift on campus, which soon led to Black women earning engineering degrees at Purdue for the first time. Achieving professional success and financial security through STEM careers was definitely a motivator for the young Black scholars, but as the BSE evolved to become the Society of Black Engineers at Purdue and later expanded to form NSBE, the focus on equity for Black communities never wavered. It remains NSBE’s focus today.
Working toward parity
NSBE proudly celebrated its 50th anniversary this year and is now an international organization with more than 25,000 precollege, collegiate, and technical professional members; more than 700 chapters in the U.S. and abroad; and tens of thousands of STEM career success stories to its credit. The number of new Black engineers produced annually by U.S. colleges and universities — including historically Black colleges and universities — grew from fewer than 1,000 when NSBE was founded in 1975 to more than 6,100 in 2022, multiplying the number of Black contributors to the STEM achievements that help maintain America’s engineering leadership.
Still, much work remains to be done to further NSBE’s mission: to increase the number of culturally responsible Black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community. Those 6,100 graduates represented only 4.3% of the 141,826 engineering bachelor’s degree recipients in 2022, far from parity with the percentage of Black people in the U.S., which is 14.4%. In 2023, the number of Black engineering bachelor’s degree recipients declined 6.1% to 5,758, the first significant drop in more than a decade. The number dropped again in 2024 to 5,584.
Black women comprise 36% of NSBE’s membership and hold many positions in the national executive board, our top governing body. Chika Okwor, a spring 2025 mechanical engineering graduate of Prairie View A&M University, is national chair, NSBE’s top volunteer position. Women are also prominent on NSBE’s staff. I serve as the CEO, and Tiffini Andorful, Ph.D., serves as head of our education pipeline efforts.
However, Black women are among the most underrepresented groups among U.S. graduates in engineering and related fields, as only 1.2% of the nation’s newly minted engineers in 2024 were Black women, according to the American Society for Engineering Education. And even though the number of STEM-educated Black women in the U.S. has inched up in recent years, they are leaving the nation’s workforce. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics reported that 25,000 fewer Black women engineers and computer scientists were employed in 2021 than in 2017.
More recent data will tell whether the troubling trends noted above are continuing, but these data have been harder to come by lately. Attacks on so-called woke ideology have evolved into a war on facts and a war on the truthful history of racial and gender discrimination. These data clearly show the need for conscious and intentional efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Growth through challenge
NSBE’s mission is more critical now than ever before. As workforce demand for STEM skills grows, NSBE is redoubling its efforts to recruit, support, and prepare the next generation of talented engineers. We are offering new initiatives that embrace bold change and innovation, and we are raising the bar for our programs and initiatives that have already achieved success.
For example, NSBE engaged in a groundbreaking partnership involving the Society of Women Engineers, AISES, Advancing Indigenous People in STEM, and SHPE, Leading Hispanics in STEM to establish the 50K Coalition. It had a goal of graduating 50,000 women and members of traditionally underrepresented groups in the U. S. with bachelor’s degrees in STEM by 2025. The coalition met that goal in 2020, five years ahead of schedule. (Read “50K Coalition Reaches Goal Five Years Early” in the Spring 2024 issue of SWE Magazine.)
NSBE’s Black STEM Experience (BSX), launched in 2022, is deepening our relationships with partners by demonstrating the value of truly inclusive workplaces.
The Women in Science and Engineering special interest group continues to carry out its mission “to enlighten, engage, and empower” NSBE women in STEM, fostering relationships and boosting collaboration with communities and institutions outside the organization.
The power of our end-to-end, student-led membership model continues to be evident in programs such as our year-round Pre-College Initiative, NSBE Jr. chapters, which have a membership of nearly 3,200 precollege students, and NSBE Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK). NSBE SEEK has encouraged more than 35,000 third- to fifth-graders across the U.S. and beyond toward STEM careers, with hands-on, team-based engineering design activities, instruction, and mentoring by STEM college students and professionals — and fun!
And people are noticing. NSBE’s membership has grown by nearly 12,000 since 2022. Our 2024 annual convention relocated from Florida to the more welcoming Georgia shortly before the event and attracted an all-time high of more than 16,600 participants, including hundreds of sponsors and career fair exhibitors. Two months later, the Nasdaq asked our student leaders to ring the closing bell for its stock exchange.
The 2024 convention served as the perfect launchpad for our yearlong 50th anniversary celebration, NSBE Gold, which culminated with the gathering of 15,658 attendees at our 2025 annual convention last March in Chicago. That event made a $30 million economic impact on the city.
At the dawn of its second half-century, NSBE is facing challenges much like those that inspired our founders. Like those activist-visionaries, we remain all in for Black excellence and racial and gender equity in STEM and the broader community. In our five decades, NSBE has endured it all — discouragement, celebrations, triumphs, and trials — and remains a growing force to be reckoned with, engineered to withstand.
The National Society of Black Engineers (nsbe.org) is one of several professional societies partnered with SWE to offer members key benefits, including reciprocal discounts and opportunities to engage in in-person and virtual programming. For more information on all SWE’s joint member organizations, visit membership.swe.org.
