The CIC’s Reach
– At a Glance –
103
CIC Partner Schools
$27M
In funding awarded to Partner Schools
41
Partner Schools making changes at the undergraduate level
70
All-day site visits, working with computing departments to identify and implement systemic changes
6
Transfer Partnerships strengthening community college computing pathways
10
Partner Schools implementing interdisciplinary computing majors (“CS+X”)
65
Partner Schools participating in the CIC’s Data Program
35
Members of the MS Pathways to Computing Consortium
15
Partner Schools building bridge programs to the MS in Cybersecurity
Impact in Undergraduate Computing Programs
Starting in 2019 with seed funding from Pivotal Ventures, the CIC launched a large-scale experiment to test the effectiveness of specific systemic interventions to undergraduate computing programs and the impact on broadening participation in computing (you can read about our interventions here).
Our focus since launch has been “large” computing programs – which we currently define as those graduating at least 100 computing students.
All schools we work with participate in the CIC’s Data Program so that they can track detailed changes in enrollment and retention, course by course and term by term.
As shown in Figure 1, to date the CIC has worked with 65 schools that represent 32% of all CIP 11 graduates per IPEDS 2022.
We measure the long-term success of this work by changes in the representation of computing graduates (i.e., increases in the representation of individuals from genders and races/ethnicities historically marginalized in computing). However, because graduation is a lagging indicator, the CIC looks to a set of earlier indicators. In particular, we are interested in changes in who is taking “CS1” (i.e., whichever class a school defines as its first programming course), who is passing CS1, and who is declaring the computing major.
We highlight some of the results of these early indicators for the 21 Partner Schools that have been implementing systemic changes for two or more years.
In Figure 2 we see that, at these 21 schools, the representation of women majoring in computing has increased from 22.0% to 25.1% from Fall 2019 to Fall 2023.
In Figure 3, we see that the race/ethnicity composition of men computing majors is also shifting.
In Figure 4, we compare the absolute increases and the growth rates in computing majors by gender and race/ethnicity. For example, at these 21 schools there are 5,039 more women and 10,728 more men majoring in 2023 than in Fall 2019 and the growth rates were 64% and 38%, respectively.
