A Native-Alaskan Program Builds Engineers on Their Home Turf

When Forest Rose Walker was growing up in Buckland, a small icebound town of 500 near Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, she was put in the corner for being a good student.

“In high school, my brother, another student, and I were told to sit there away from the other students and learn algebra I,” says Ms. Walker, now 24 and a senior studying civil engineering at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.

People in Buckland, mostly subsistence hunters, fishermen, and their families, weren’t expected to excel at math or science, she recalls. Residents of Alaska’s native villages have had some of the lowest rates of academic achievement in the country. Those three students were the only ones studying algebra in Ms. Walker’s class that year.

“We didn’t learn much because we were kids trying to teach ourselves,” she says.

Ms. Walker’s life changed when, as a high-school senior, she traveled to Anchorage to take part in a program designed to help people like her become scientists and engineers: the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, known as Ansep. Since then, she has taken part in a precollege immersion course in the sciences, studied earthquake management—“down in China,” she says—and interned for NASA.

“In high school, I couldn’t imagine doing any of that,” Ms. Walker says. “Now, I see there are many things I can do, even just within civil engineering.”

Education Roadblocks

Traditionally, native Alaskans have faced barriers to learning, as Ms. Walker did. Many native schools have not offered the advanced math and physics courses necessary to groom students for scientific or technological careers.

Despite a decades-long energy boom, Alaska has traditionally done a poor job of preparing members of its large native population—about 100,000 of the state’s overall population of 735,000—for engineering jobs in its vast oil fields.

Ansep, formed by a former pipeline roughneck turned college engineering professor, has graduated 300 native Alaskans since it was founded 20 years ago.

In the 15 years before the program was created, the state’s colleges produced only two engineering graduates among native Alaskans.

The program, based on the campus of the University of Alaska at Anchorage, also works to teach indigenous students math and science from middle school on up, offering summer programs and arranging for internships and jobs.

Ansep has won support from the Rasmuson Foundation, an Alaska grant maker, which has provided more than $7-million in grants since 2003.

Other donors include the Margaret A. Cargill, Ford, Bill & Melinda Gates, and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, as well as numerous oil, gas, and pipeline companies.

Denied Tenure

The program’s founder, Herbert Ilisaurri Schroeder, was a federal government employee in the 1980s when he became aware of how educational gaps among Alaskan natives affected rural-life conditions in the state.

He worked in “honey-bucket communities”—rural outposts that typically lack plumbing and sewers, forcing residents to dump toilet waste near their homes.

Tramped back into houses, it can cause diseases and contribute to problems like infant mortality.

“In the two years working that job, I never met a native engineer,” says Mr. Schroeder, whose adopted middle name, given to him by a student, is the Inupiaq word for “guide” or “teacher.”

“The local people and engineers were having a hard time understanding each other,” he says. “How well are you going to solve a problem specific to a population only with people from outside of it?

“Here you had people who had been living on the land for 10,000 years, but they didn’t have much say as to how that land was used.”

Mr. Schroeder returned home to Chicago, earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering, took a job teaching engineering in Anchorage, and announced his plans to form Ansep. He encountered resistance from the school’s engineering dean and others, he says, and the disparaging response continued for years.

“He was denied tenure, accused of dumbing down the engineering department, and actively discouraged from continuing the program,” says Diane Kaplan, president of the Rasmuson Foundation.

“Nobody believed these students could succeed. But he did,” adds Ms. Kaplan. “He failed math in high school. He understood the obstacles.”

Expanded Program

Mr. Schroeder’s ability to expand the program in spite of barriers, as well as his conviction that discrimination against young Alaskan natives must be reversed, attracted Rasmuson’s support, Ms. Kaplan says.

“It’s about system change—it wasn’t all about him,” she says. “We rarely see individuals who are as clear as he was about what they want and how they’ll get it. When he approached us for help, he told us he didn’t want this to be his program, that he wanted it to outlive him, and Ansep needed its own building to accomplish that.”

With the help of grant makers like Rasmuson, the Ansep Building opened in 2006. An endowed chair followed in 2008. Currently, the program, once a one-man operation, has a $4.5-million budget and a staff of seven.

Ansep’s results have attracted grant makers. Only 4 percent of minority students nationwide enter college prepared for course work in engineering, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Ansep tries to reach its students early on. Largely because of Ansep’s work, about 80 percent of native Alaskans have completed algebra I by the end of eighth grade. The national average among all students is 26 percent.

“Now we bring in students with trigonometry, chemistry, and physics courses behind them, at the minimum,” Mr. Schroeder says. “Before, algebra I might have been all that they took with them to college.” Now, more than 1,200 students are in the Ansep pipeline, he says, from the fifth-grade level to Ph.D. candidates.

Seeing the value in Ansep’s approach, the National Science Foundation made a grant several years ago so Mr. Schroeder could start computer-building programs for high-school students in several Western states. But it never caught on with other funders.

“Once the NSF money was gone, so was the program,” he says. “Unfortunately, we haven’t had anybody come to us and ask if they could use it as a national model.”

Thinking Big

But that means little to those within the local program, who say that its value transcends the education they receive. They cite the sense of mission that comes with being an Ansep student or alumnus.

“We’re changing the face of engineering,” says Michele Yatchmeneff, a doctoral candidate in engineering education at Purdue University who hails from King Cove, a village in the Aleutian Islands. An Ansep graduate, she managed some of its college and high-school programs.

The program taught her to think big, she says: “If I had left Ansep after I got my bachelor’s degree, I would have just gone into industry. But Ansep let me know that a higher degree was possible.”

Ms. Yatchmeneff and others say there is also value in studying together with people who share the same culture and customs. The closeness they enjoy as they make their way through secondary school and college is an important part of the experience for them.

“It’s hard to leave Ansep once you get involved because rural Alaskan kids get so much support there,” Ms. Walker says. “It’s like a home away from home. It’s a small community that makes us feel safe.”