Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!fester@math.berkeley.edu
From: fester@math.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Special programs
Message-ID: <11689@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 6 Jul 88 01:53:25 GMT
References: <11101@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <11535@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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In article <11535@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> dana@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Dana Bergen) writes:
>I had the good fortune to discover the Computer Science Reentry Program
>at U.C. Berkeley.  The program is open to women and "underrepresented
>minorities" who want to go to graduate school in Computer Science but
>have an undergraduate degree in something other than C.S.  Through it,
>I was able to take undergraduate C.S. courses at Berkeley without being 
>enrolled in a degree program (this is normally not allowed).  On the 

I am curious about the success rate programs like these have.  I know
of a vaguely similar one in Engineering at Boston University.  Of course,
one needs to define "success": I'm interested in the completion rate of
women who enter such programs.

It's an odd thing, many of these affirmative action programs.  The ones
I have heard of are mostly admissions of some sort (i.e. quotas, special
programs, etc.)  The premise behind them is that women (or minorities,
but I'm dealing strictly with the women issue at the moment) have been
disadvantaged educationally and as a consequence are underrepresented
in certain fields.  True enough.  But being educationally disadvantaged
means that not only are these women incapable (probably) of being
*admitted* to do certain kinds of degree work, but that they are then
equally likely to not be initially capable of performing at the same
level as their peers.  So that a program which merely *admits* women
and then says, essentially, "you are entirely on your own" is not
neccessarily doing much good.  Does the Computer Science Re-entry
Program have resources available for such women (e.g. tutoring, early
advising if advising is nonstandard in the CS department, etc.) ? 
What are other women's experiences with coming into computer science
(or other technical fields) through such programs ?


Lea Fester
fester@math.berkeley.edu