Exploring Cultural Capital Among Black Engineering Students at Minority Serving Institutions

Despite ongoing efforts to increase the representation of Black students in engineering, participation among Black students remains low. While past research on Black students in engineering has highlighted the challenges they experience in higher educational institutions, a growing amount seeks to use assets-based perspectives to highlight their experiences. Although a significant number of Black engineering students graduate from MSIs, there has been less published research on their experiences compared to research in PWI settings. We draw and build upon the work of researchers who highlight how engineering students possess cultural wealth that allows them to succeed in engineering.

Using community cultural wealth (CCW), we explored how five Black engineering undergraduate students at Historically Black Colleges & Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions cultivated and used their cultural capital. We used a qualitative approach that included semi-structured interviews. The interviews were analyzed using an iterative process of inductive and deductive coding. The six forms of cultural capital (linguistic, resistant, familial, social, aspirational, and navigational) served as a priori codes for deductive analysis.

We developed two themes that describe how students built, supported, and used their cultural capital, which included Relationships as the Bedrock for Success and Intersections of Cultural Capital in Overcoming Challenges. Our research findings revealed that familial and social relationships are crucial for early STEM engagement, emotional support, building aspirations, and developing needed skills for navigating engineering. Black engineering students were also sources of cultural capital for their peers, reinforcing their cultural wealth. To overcome challenges, Black engineering students used intersections of their cultural capital. These students employed combinations, layers, and multi-directional aspects of their cultural capital to persist and become successful in engineering. This study emphasizes the necessity for research acknowledging differences in Black students’ experiences at HSIs and HBCUs and the importance of diversifying faculty and their approaches to engaging with students. We contribute to the body of research that uses antideficit approaches to examine the experiences of Black engineering students at MSIs.