50K Coalition: 50,000 Diverse Engineers Graduating Annually by 2025.
In 2016, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) formed the 50K Coalition, a collaborative of over 60 organizations committed to increasing the number of bachelor of science in engineering degrees awarded annually to BIPOC and women from 30,000 to 50,000 by 2025, a 66% increase.
With an initial planning grant from the United Engineering Foundation (UEF), 83 leaders of the engineering community (representing 13 professional societies with over 700,000 members), deans of engineering, minority engineering and women in engineering administrators from 11 leading colleges of engineering, and corporate partners (representing six global industries) convened on April 20- 21, 2016. The convening brought together a cross-sector of people and stakeholder organizations with unique roles and perspectives on the challenges to inclusion in engineering within our nation’s academic institutions and a commitment to meeting our nation’s burgeoning need for technical talent over the next decade.
A strength of the 50K Coalition is that many of its members have well-established relationships that facilitate regular communication and interaction. The Leadership Circle organizations, AISES, NSBE, SHPE, and SWE, established a backbone organization to strengthen continuous communications between partners and make information readily accessible to all members. This includes capturing and consolidating project plans and data, encouraging new programs, disseminating best practices; reporting data and project milestones; planning and hosting virtual and in-person convenings, and producing an annual 50K Coalition Engineering Scorecard.
The 50K Coalition is not another program but a sustained and structured collaboration of associations, colleges, universities, agencies, corporations, and foundations working toward common goals by leveraging their unique missions, relationships, and institutional memory thru Collective Impact. To learn more, visit the 50K Coalition website.
