Female SLU students recognized by Forbes magazine

Female SLU students recognized by Forbes magazine

By LORI SHULL
TIMES STAFF WRITER
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 2011

CANTON — St. Lawrence University is not the first north country college that comes to mind when talking about math or the sciences. But, according to a ranking released by Forbes magazine, it is one of the best in those fields when it comes to female enrollment figures.

Traditionally, undergraduate women do not choose majors in the sciences, technology, engineering or math. St. Lawrence is bucking that trend; of the students who have declared a major, 60 percent of students majoring those four fields are women.

“Some of the sciences are among our top majors every year,” university spokeswoman Macreena A. Doyle said.

Though 57 percent of undergraduate students are women, they comprise less than half of the nation’s math majors, and just 20 percent of its computer science and engineering majors, according to Forbes.

At SLU, however, those numbers are far more robust.

Of the university’s 1,120 juniors and seniors, 425 have declared a major in one of the sciences. Sixty percent of those, or 255, are women.

Undergraduate students do not declare a major until their junior year, so college officials could not give data for the entire student body.

Though the college has been known for its geology program for decades, promoting women in those four areas, which also are known as STEM fields, became a priority under former President Daniel F. Sullivan, according to Ms. Doyle. That commitment is most obvious in the nearly $40 million Johnson Hall of Science, which opened in 2007.

“We have seen a bit of an uptick in students in sciences” since the hall opened, Ms. Doyle said. “The students who are interested in science, if they are women or minorities, when they begin looking for schools, when they see a small school that has more individual support, I think that’s what they’re going to gravitate to.

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That individual support includes research partnerships with professors as undergraduates.
Last summer, 33 fellowships were awarded. Twenty of those were in STEM fields, 13 of which were women fellows.

The Forbes ranking took the top 20 schools among the 400 schools it considers America’s Best. Though Clarkson University, Potsdam, is on that top 400 list, it did not make the STEM list.
Of Clarkson’s 2,648 undergraduate students, approximately 750 are women. Nearly 600 of those women are majoring in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines.

Clarkson also has several programs aimed at increasing the number of women in those fields, including leadership training, scholarships and residential programs for seventh- and eighth-grade girls to investigate various aspects of those fields, according to college spokesman Michael P. Griffin.

For the women’s ranking, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, and the Polytechnic Institute at New York University also made the list in the state.

“It’s tremendous to be recognized for something that we do well, and it’s nice to know that a national media organization recognized that, because it’s not something that tends to get noticed,” Ms. Doyle said. “We know that we do that, but it’s not always the thing that get recognized. We think it should be.”

on the net

Forbes: www.forbes.com/2010/12/10/best-colleges-minorities-women-science-lifestyle-education-stem.html