Latino children make up one of the fastest-growing demographics in K-12 education. Yet few are likely to grow up and establish careers in technology. For them, there’s obviously a leak somewhere in the school-to-jobs pipeline.

Just one in 10 tech workers are Latino, and while Latino college students are choosing STEM fields in college more frequently, they earn only about 12 percent of undergraduate degrees awarded in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Federal data shows that K-12 schools with high percentages of Hispanic students offer fewer STEM courses than schools with lower proportions of Hispanic kids.

Reporter Nadia Tamez-Robledo recently moderated a panel of tech experts at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual conference to talk about why Latinos are still lagging in science education and what it’s going to take to make sure they don’t get left behind — particularly in the fast-growing AI industry. Read the top takeaways below.

Why Is Increasing Latinos in STEM Important?

Diana Logreira is web program manager at the NASA Science Mission Directorate, which studies Earth from space. She said the organization is trying to increase Latino interest in science through initiatives like a partnership with Arizona State University to create K-12 science activities, and the effort is part of their overall mission to drive innovation.

“We need to involve more underrepresented communities in our programs and missions and our research, so what we've been doing is trying to figure out how we can plug in our content into those communities,” Logreira said. “For us, innovation is a must, and there is a lot of research that shows that diversity is related and connected to the efficiency of innovation and scientific discovery.”

Maria Guedez is senior vice president of business development and technology at Denbury, an oil and gas company owned by Exxon Mobil. She said that with Latinos making up 20 percent of college students, they are the company’s future workforce. She believes they will help it both continue to be an energy provider and leverage technology to combat climate change.

“Making sure they understand, that they see themselves reflected in the space and in the possibilities of how they can play a role [is important],” Guedez said. “At Exxon Mobil, we've been committed for many years to feeding that pipeline.”

She said that industry partnerships with schools will be “critical” to increasing the share of Latinos entering science and technology jobs, and one way her company does that is by sending its own scientists to do demonstrations in schools. Part of the goal is to broaden what types of careers students can pursue in the sciences.

“They think of it in a very narrow sense, and sometimes they don't have a reference point of what that looks like,” Guedez said. “They might not have anybody in their families or in their circle that have been in STEM careers, so [school partnerships are] bridging that representation and providing an opportunity for them to see what it actually means to take a career in engineering, math, science.”

Noel Candelaria, secretary-treasurer of the National Education Association, pointed to statistics that show Latinos accounted for more than 90 percent of U.S. population growth since the start of the pandemic, and that they will make up 78 percent of new workers by 2030. Those figures are reasons why Latino students need to be engaged in tech classes and career pathways, he explained.

“We want to make sure that the new workforce is in advanced technologies,” Candelaria said, “not just the service industry — [in] which we have been pigeonholed as a community for decades — but that we're actually the ones that are leading in this space.”

What Are the Challenges to Increasing Latinos in STEM?

Isabella Elvir-Ray, program management director at Salesforce, said one of the steps to advancing Latinos in technology is to change the way the community thinks about artificial intelligence.

“When we hear the word AI, most of us fear it,” Elvir-Ray said. “How do we remove that fear out of AI — the sense that it will replace humans?”

In her experience, young Latinos like her 14-year-old son are excited about AI and want opportunities to use it in school. That enthusiasm should be tapped.

“I think that is the topic of this conversation: How do we merge technologies into our educational system for the underrepresented minorities?” Elvir-Ray said. “Especially [encouraging] our Latino community to embrace these technologies, because they have embraced these technologies at an early stage in their life.”

Candelaria said the National Education Association has published guidance on its website about “equitably and justly bringing AI into our schools, into our classrooms.” Schools still need expertise from industry professionals in their communities on how to ensure their students get the most out of the fast-growing technology.

“One thing that our members kept telling us for the last couple of years is, ‘This is here and now, and we need help,’” Candelaria said of artificial intelligence. That means help “making sure that we're looking at how we're bringing AI into the classrooms, making sure that we're adequately funding our public schools to not only have the software and the hardware, but the training that is needed by educators.”

Beyond having a roadmap for teaching AI content, Candelaria said that infrastructure, internet connectivity and attracting tech-savvy teachers are also major needs for ensuring that Latino students have STEM education options. It’s difficult to retrofit schools that are 100 years old for modern classrooms, he added, and rural students in particular need help with access to the internet at home.

“We're seeing record numbers of Latino students coming into our rural communities, a lot of them who are immigrating to this country for the very first time and don't have the [internet] infrastructure,” Candelaria said. “It doesn't help if we're able to connect our schools [but] we're not able to connect them in the community. If we're not doing that, then we're gonna be leaving all of our students behind, especially in Latino communities, who overwhelmingly — 90-plus percent of them — attend our public schools.”

The Need for Mentorship

Another theme that emerged from the panel was how mentorship played a role in the panelists’ journey into tech careers.

Guedez said she had a relative who worked in the oil and gas industry, and who told her about the type of careers that pursuing engineering could bring her. She’s had mentors throughout her nearly two decades at Exxon Mobil, including access to nearly 2,000 members of the company’s Latino employee group.

Elvir-Ray said that, as an undergrad, she chose a degree in information management systems “because I had said to myself, ‘I'm not smart enough to do [computer] programming.’” It was an unexpected opportunity to do an IT internship at Fannie Mae that changed her mentality.

“From that moment, I was hooked because I understood that being in IT wasn't only about programming,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can't just be in a corner typing code.’ I'm a social person, and what this internship showed me was that there were other types of careers in IT where you can deal with customers, you can deal with people.”

Logreira said she and other members of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Hispanic employee group volunteer their time to join their HR colleagues at conferences and campus visits where Latino students are going to be as part of increasing the visibility of Latinos in tech.

“We are trying to create that mentality that, ‘We can do it,’” Logreira said. “The fact that I'm here today, I have to say, somebody at some point realized that I had something to bring to the table.”