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Abstract
American colleges and universities are urgently addressing issues of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). This phenomenon can be modeled as a response to multiple shocks to the social and organizational environment. At the enterprise level, the goal of EDI initiatives is to support and include underrepresented minorities (URM) within the institutions by expanding organizational operating ranges and creating an environment of success. Individual students are faced with making decisions to help them increase the value of their own experience and reach success. The authors describe a project to help expand the range of " success pathways" for those individuals, especially URM undergraduate students. Identifying experiences associated with success pathways represents a value chain with three domains of success outcomes: 1) becoming a competitive candidate for job positions and career success; 2) experiencing a positive and supportive college experience; and 3) research preparation and introduction to success pathways via graduate school. It is important to track programs and pathways across a variety of STEM majors, including each domain of success outcomes, so that students are more aware of the options available to help them. This allows students to expand their own "operating range" and self-definition of success; administrators become more able to identify how to limit negative student outcomes through a systematic process evaluation. The authors discuss how decision analysis associated with EDI pathways to increase the quality of URM student experiences can help assess and improve their resilience and robustness of these students in a more just and timely manner.
Keywords
Organizational design; operating range; racial equity, diversity, and inclusion; success pathways; decision making.
1.Introduction
The growing encouragement of implementing EDI initiatives within many higher education institutions in America is only in infancy. As a part of the effort to remain in positive public favor and attempt to repair broken systems which denied equal opportunities, these efforts are not going away or slowing down. Fostering an environment in which URM students succeed at the undergraduate level increases diversity and success in industry as well as graduate programs. At the enterprise level, this response to multiple shocks to the social and organizational systems posed by the current demand from activists must be handled deliberately and with the utmost care. It is impossible to...