A position to increase diversity has been created within the College of Engineering.

Nancy Knight, current program coordinator for electrical and computer engineering, is the College’s first director of diversity and graduate student affairs. Knight’s new position will target improving campus diversity within the ISU graduate college. She will start Sept. 1.

“It’s important to improve diversity on all levels at Iowa State,” Knight said. “With a more diverse student body, especially in the College of Engineering, we see a much-improved end product.”

As part of the new position, Knight said she will place an emphasis in improving ethnic diversity at the graduate level at Iowa State. There is currently a critical shortage of minority graduate students, she said.

“One of the main objectives of the position is making the graduate college more attractive to multicultural students,” said Diane Rover, associate dean for the College of Engineering. “The position will help manage and organize the College of Engineering’s efforts to do this.”

The low number of minority students is more pronounced in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, Knight said.

According to statistics from the Office of the Registrar, in 2002, 5.55 percent of graduate students identified themselves as minorities. This number does not include international students.

One reason for lower minority enrollment is a “pipeline problem,” in which multicultural students do not receive appropriate encouragement to take science and math courses in high school, and are not encouraged to pursue careers and degrees in science and technology fields, said Nancy Horvath, director of finance and operations for the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science.

Increasing the number of female students is also a goal of her new position, Knight said.

“We’re not just working with ethnic diversity, but gender diversity as well,” she said. “There are currently only 15 percent of undergraduate female students that make up the university-wide engineering program.”

There are a number of programs at the university that target recruiting and retaining underrepresented students, such as African American and Native American students. These students currently make up only a small percentage of the graduate student population, and the creation of the new position is an attempt to change that, Rover said.

“We didn’t feel we were being as effective as we could be, and a director of diversity should be a step in the right direction,” Rover said.

The position will also serve as an important “outlet” for multicultural students at the graduate level, creating better access to the variety of resources available to them, Rover said.

The biggest challenge Knight anticipates she will face while serving in her new position is coordinating, and discovering what programs are in place at the university aimed at improving campus diversity, she said.

“The director of diversity will help the college reach a quantitative goal of obtaining higher numbers of multicultural students, by making the university’s graduate programs more attractive to women and multicultural students. We also have a qualitative goal as well; by maximizing the resources available to multicultural students, a director of diversity will improve the quality of the educational environment and give diverse students a better college experience,” Rover said.