SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY

Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

GLOBAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES IN ENGINEERING

Module 2: Ethics, Engineering, and Social Justice

Reflection Paper 4

Name

Danh Dang

Hackathon Group

Duy Phan
Danh Dang
Tuan Pham
Thuy Vu

Student ID

008280857

Date

Oct 24, 2014

sThe problem that our group selected during the hackathon to analyze is the low collegegoing rate of public high school students in California. The results of the hackathon were
expected to reflect potential solutions that help increase the statewide rate of high school students
who attend public colleges and universities in California. During the hackathon, our group
focused on the aspect of fairness to derive our desired outcomes, and to construct the benchmark
under which the group solution is evaluated.
The rapid proliferation of technology in conjunction with the economic growth has
challenged the society with new high standards for its workforce. In the age of automation in
industry, workers no longer play passive roles in assembly lines to solely perform repetitive
tasks. In fact, the advancement of technology deeply seeds from the workers brain power as
they operate complex machinery, follow specific protocols, and implement innovative designs.
Thus, higher education from colleges and universities has become inevitable to maintain the
societys growth. However, the average college-going rate to public institutions in California is
reported to be only 40.6 % in 2009. The motivation of our groups discussion during the
hackathon is to propose possible solutions to foster high school students pursuit of higher
education.
Desired outcomes of the hackathon were strictly derived from all group members
common goal of altering the low average college-going rate in California, and were significantly
shaped with the value of fairness. In other words, the whole group agreed that expected
outcomes need to reflect equality and to assure a fair access to higher education opportunities
among all ethnic groups. According to the Postsecondary Education Commissions official
website, high school students from Black and Hispanic communities have the lowest collegegoing rate of 33% and 29% respectively. As a result, our desired outcome is not only to increase

the statewide average college-going rate, but also to raise the figure specifically among Black
and Hispanic students. With this particular aspiration, our expected outcomes, thus, include a
gain in the number of first-time college students through effective orientation and mentoring,
strong institution-community collaboration, and high expectations for senior students in high
schools.
With determined desired outcomes, all members in our group participated in the
hackathon with plentiful explanations, testimonies, and observations related to the college-going
rate of local high schools; yet, we quickly acknowledged existed constraints within the group as
the discussion developed. The most prominent constraint started to appear as the group did not
acquire much personal experience and testimonies from first-time college students. In fact, there
is only one first-time college student out of five group members. Besides, there is neither Black
nor Hispanic students in the group to voice their opinions or to shed a light on the issue from
their perspectives. This unbalanced group composition truly challenged all members during
brainstorming for proper solutions to match the layouted desired outcome because prevailing
ideas mostly came from students who have inherited rich education heritage and good orientation
from their families. Yet, the group did not want to exclude absent identities in the solution
although the lack of testimonies from first-time college students in the group challenged
members by biasing their perspectives unconsciously. It took our group a considerable amount
of time and work to understand first-time college students limitations and difficulties in
accessing information and mentoring for higher education. At the end, all group members had a
memorable opportunity to put their feet in others shoes to analyze a social problem.
Our groups solution to the low college-going rate in California can be simply described
as: raising standards and providing supports for high school students. Specific actions involve

with raising the bar in hiring employees at local companies in order to stimulate high school
students eager of pursuing higher education through encouraging them to study and train for
better paid jobs. In other words, the collaboration between local communities and institution is
highlighted in our solution as the responsibility is shared among different parties. In conjunction,
high school students need to be provided with quality learning assistance services such as
tutoring, mentoring, and training. The alteration of these learning facilities will strongly ignite
the will and the capability to learn among high school students.
The success of the hackathon was assessed through the equality level reflected in the
solution. In other words, fairness and inclusion are the main values on which we mirror our final
solution to assess its productiveness. The final solution shows itself as a potential answer for the
discussed problem as it revolves around the value of equality in accessing community resources
like education information and opportunities. Our solutions from raising the standards and
providing the supports were carefully filtered to avoid bias through practicing fairness and
inclusion during the group discussion. Simply put, we accounted unvoiced opinions as our
emphasis in the solution is to facilitate an equal distribution of learning and self-improving
resources for different individuals regardless of their family background and ethnic identities. In
brief, fairness in accessing learning resources is a reliable benchmark under which we construct
our solution.
The problem of low college-going rate in California was discussed during the hackathon.
Approach the problem with the value of fairness and inclusion, the group desired to increase the
number of first-time college students among all ethnic groups. During the hackathon, we
recognized the imbalance in the group composition as the most prominent constraint. Despite the
lack of Black, Hispanic, and first-time college students in the group, we were still able to agree

on the solution of raising the standards and providing the supports to facilitate equal access to
education opportunities and to ignite high school students learning will regardless of their
identities. Thus, the benchmark to evaluate the success of the hackathon is built upon the
equality level reflected in our solution.

Reference
Postsecondary Education Commission Official Website. Retrieved on Oct 20, 2014 from
http://www.cpec.ca.gov/StudentDataCACGRCounty.asp