The need for a highly trained CS workforce is one that is shared by nearly every industry, university, and government agency. Computer science enrollments have risen substantially in the last decade nationally, with double digit percentage increases most years.  But the percentage of women remains low at 19% of CS graduates in 2015, according to the Computing Research Association's Taulbee Survey. The low participation of women in CS negatively impacts the robustness of the computing workforce and the level of technical innovation possible in CS-based organizations.

The DIMACS Center, Douglass Residential College, the Rutgers CS Department, and the Computing Research Association's Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) collaborated to address this problem, aiming to increase the number of women in computer science (CS) majors through development and evaluation of a CS Living-Learning Community (LLC) and contribute to the research on best practices related to CS LLCs.  Specifically, the project developed a living-learning community (LLC) for first-year undergraduate women in CS. Through an immersive educational and community-building experience, the program is designed to promote student engagement and success in computing. The LLC incorporates mentoring, academic and professional development activities, a community of peers for friendship and academic support, and exposure to the issues and applications of CS.

We hypothesized that among first-year women college students who are interested in majoring in CS, those who participate in the LLC would exhibit substantially higher levels of engagement and success throughout their undergraduate years in comparison to their non-LLC peers, and in turn, would be more likely to declare a CS or a computing-related major than those do who not participate in an LLC.  The first cohort of students started in the 2016-2017 academic year.  The project studied the first three cohorts of students through the end of the 2018-2019 academic year. 

CERP carried out evaluation of the CS LLC using a quasi-experimental research methodology that compared LLC participants to a comparison group of similar first-year women interested in majoring in CS and completing the introductory-level computer science course. Both the LLC participants and their comparison group were surveyed at the beginning and the end of their first year. Across all three cohorts of students, CERP found LLC students reported more engagement in active learning over the course of their first year than the comparison group. Further, findings indicated that LLC students' mentorship and peer support improved each year of the program, with LLC students reporting stronger levels of support on average than the comparison group by Cohorts 2 and 3. CERP results also revealed challenges in sustaining students' confidence in their computing abilities and help students feel welcomed and supported within the broader computing department, with both the LLC participants and the comparison group showing a decrease in these over the course of the year, something that warrants further study.

Although it is too soon to see majors at graduation for our participants (and indeed, at Rutgers, students frequently do not declare their majors until fairly late in their studies), initial data suggests that, as the end of the 2018-2019 academic year, the second and third cohorts of LLC participants are pursuing the CS major or minor or the computing-related Information Technology and Informatics (ITI) at a higher rate than its comparison groups (though it is too soon for cohort three to have declared their major).  We note that the first cohort had a lower rate of students choosing computing majors (with only 71% choosing computing majors), which we believe was due to lack of clarity about the purpose of the program in our recruiting of the first cohort, and we adjusted for future cohorts.  For cohort 2, 71% of the LLC participants have declared a computing major or minor vs. 50% in their comparison group; an additional 24% of the LLC participants are making progress consistent with a CS or ITI major, for a total of 95% of the cohort 2 LLC participants appearing to be on track for a computing major.

The long-term goal of the project is to establish best-practice approaches to engaging students in CS during their early years in college.  Based on the outcomes to date, Rutgers plans to continue running the CS LLC indefinitely, while continuing to measure and improve the program.  It is our hope that this approach will be adopted by other institutions and that the Rutgers CS LLC and similar programs will help diversify the computing workforce by inspiring and motivating new generations of students to pursue degrees in CS and careers in technology broadly defined.

Last Modified: 11/25/2019
Modified by: Rebecca N Wright