STEM Solutions Leadership Conference in San Diego—and You’re Invited

U.S. News & World Report, renowned for its rankings in the areas of education, money, health, and more, is hosting its STEM Solutions Conference in San Diego, June 29 to July 1. BLACK ENTERPRISE, a media partner of U.S. News & World Report and a participant in the conference, sat down with Brian Kelly, editor and chief content officer at U.S. News & World Report, to find out more about the upcoming conference.

“The STEM Solutions Conference is designed to be a leadership forum,” says Kelly. “We think of STEM as an industry without any real structure to it. There are so many people interested in STEM and pursuing it from an education standpoint and a job standpoint, but there wasn’t any one real gathering place for all those folks. That’s why we started the STEM Solutions Conference.”

“This is our fifth year bringing together a very diverse group of folks: educators, employers, policymakers, journalists, people from the nonprofit sector, and we use it as an opportunity to get the best thinking, the best practices together, put them on stage, and create a lot of opportunities for people to network and share ideas and contacts.”

But why STEM? Kelly says U.S. News had a unique vantage point because of its data. The company had been ranking colleges for 30 years and now ranks engineering schools and even high schools. “Similarly,” says Kelly, “we have content, rankings, and other information about jobs.” But the two sides weren’t matching up as well as they could. “So many jobs are in the technical areas, but a lot of the education focus is not in those areas.”

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Writing about the economy and companies, but also hearing how employers couldn’t fill jobs although the country had a high unemployment rate–”It was kind of putting those pieces together,” says Kelly. “This is a unique community and a lot of people are doing [STEM], but no one’s talking to each other. We think of STEM as an industry, but it really isn’t. You have all these folks working in their own corner, sometimes it’s regional, sometimes it’s one industry or another. We just thought the conference was a great opportunity to bring people together. We put up the tent and we invite people to come into it.”

Over the five years that U.S. News has been holding the STEM Solutions Conference, Kelly says he’s seen a growing awareness that STEM is important to career development; he also says he’s seeing a greater sophistication. “People originally thought of STEM as being a rocket scientist or having a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. People seem to understand now that STEM is in everything.” Many jobs require basic math skills, basic statistics, a basic understanding of science, Kelly says, but that message isn’t getting as widely distributed as it needs to. In particular, it isn’t resonating in the minority community. Yet, more and more it’s from the minority community that the labor pool is being replenished, Kelly notes, so it’s imperative that communities of color hear the message: STEM is critical.

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“At the conference, we’ll be introducing a parent’s guide to STEM,” Kelly says. The 100-page, glossy booklet will offer step by step guidance to parents so they will know how to help their kids. “It’s easy to follow without being simplistic, and it offers a lot of resources.” It will also be published on the U.S. News website.

Panel discussions make up a key part of the STEM Solutions Conference. The opening keynote panel, Making STEM Diversity a National Priority, will feature Michael Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF; and Leland Melvin, NASA astronaut and host, Lifetime’s Child Genius, among others. Kelly will speak one-on-one with the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Thomas E. Perez. He hopes to press the secretary on what more the federal government can do in support of STEM training. “The president has been pretty articulate from a policy standpoint about what needs to be done, but there hasn’t been much that they’ve been able to do about creating new programs and initiatives. In particular the Labor Department does have a lot of funds that relate to technical training and career education. And that’s an area that sometimes gets ignored as it relates to STEM, but things like basic computer coding training and developing skills to go into advanced manufacturing at the community college level–that’s where Labor has the ability to put some more resources, so I want to understand more about what they think they can do, and why they are having trouble getting some of these things moved along.”

Kelly says that one thing that makes the conference a success is having people and organizations make connections across regions, when, for example, someone from Kentucky talks to someone from Washington state and brings a successful program to their own region.

“We think it’s important to celebrate programs that are successful. We put them on stage. We let them talk about what they do. In many cases they get funding for it. Some of the programs we’ve talked about over the years have begun to grow and I think it’s important that there are more programs dealing with these issues on a national level.”

Kelly cited Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the Girl Scouts, Project Lead the Way, National Math and Science Initiative–just a few of the programs that are working to help solve the STEM crisis. This year’s theme, diversity in STEM, is an important issue in communities of color, which are typically economically and academically underserved; the theme also addresses the issue of women in STEM.

To register or to get more information about the STEM Solutions Conference, go to http://usnewsstemsolutions.com/.