Actuarial Science Summer Program for Women and Minorities

AbstractDrake University offered a 5-day program focusing on the recruitment of women and minorities into actuarial science studies. A few universities offer actuarial science summer camps targeting high school students. Participants in this camp, however, came exclusively from community colleges. In this article, we provide an overview of the camp's activities, structure, and outcomes. We present a longitudinal analysis of student feedback, reflecting results from one survey administered before the camp began and another distributed very near the camp's end. Our results indicate the camp succeeded on many counts.IntroductionDrake University's actuarial science program enjoys significant institutional support in student recruiting; large-scale industry support in providing internships, jobs, and scholarship funding; and a strong reputation nationally as 1 of 13 original Centers for Actuarial Excellence (CAEs), and among the 21 current CAEs. Yet we believe that our program and the profession can be furthered strengthened by developing a more diverse student body and increasing participation by women and underrepresented minorities like African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.1 With this in mind, we looked at the Joint CAS/SOA Committee on Actuarial Diversity (COAD) summer camp model as a way to attract women,2 modifying it to partner with community colleges rather than with high schools. While the model gave us a place to start, we developed our own program.The reasons for working with community college students include that:* They enroll a higher percentage of underrepresented minorities than do 4-year baccalaureate institutions (this is true in Iowa as well as nationally);* They quite often excel at working in the community, and reaching out into underrepresented populations requires community engagement.It is also true that community college:* Students who have successfully completed at least one semester of college course work with satisfactory grades are more likely to complete their baccalaureate degrees than are high school students with no college credit earned;* Students are often overlooked by 4-year institutions in recruiting for highly structured, technically oriented majors like actuarial science; and* Faculty and staff have established mentoring relationships with students that can carry over into the camp and provide a way to connect with the actuarial profession both before students set foot on campus and after students finish camp.Drake chose to work initially with Black Hawk College; with its main campus in Moline, Illinois; and Scott Community College located in Bettendorf, Iowa.3 We chose these partners for their proximity to Drake University, their infrastructure for supporting this type of program, and their interest in partnering with Drake. Also, all three institutionshave an institutional commitment to create in their students an awareness of diversity issues that will make them responsible global citizens. This commonality in missions helps create a common purpose for our program: to increase the number of women and underrepresented minority students in the professional pipeline, focusing on actuarial science, but also with some exposure to other insurance-related careers. We hope the program can also be seen as a model of future partnerships between private institutions and public, and community colleges.Below, we discuss structure, results, and future directions for the Actuarial Science Summer Camp for Women and Minorities, a partnership between Drake University, Black Hawk College, and Scott Community College.4 Offering this program helps increase the number of college-educated minorities and women with some knowledge of career options in actuarial science and insurance. We also hope to use the program to recruit more minorities and women to actuarial studies and thus create a larger "pipeline" of college-educated minorities and women from employers to draw upon when recruiting. …