When Pedro Barba was looking at universities for his graduate study, it was a minority program in the MSU College of Engineering that made up his mind, he said.
In 2000, after completing his undergraduate degree at Technol-gico de Monterrey in Mexico, the electrical and computer engineering graduate student joined the Sloan Engineering program, which is geared toward minority students at MSU.
The College of Engineering - the program's host - received national attention Monday when Hispanic Business magazine ranked it fifth in the nation for Latino graduate students.
The Sloan program provides a level of assistance for minorities that he hadn't seen before, Barba said.
"You go to other schools and you don't see support," he said. "I met a lot of people here ? Sloan students tend to help each other a lot."
Percy Pierre, professor of electrical engineering and director of the program, said he is involved with recruiting and retaining potential members.
"I personally go to universities around the country and Puerto Rico to talk to graduating seniors about the benefits of going to grad school," he said. "What we do begins when we visit universities and ends when they are in good jobs."
Joel Russell, deputy managing editor at Hispanic Business magazine, said researchers have specific criteria associated with the ranking.
"We look at enrollment, retention, faculty, student services such as clubs that address Latino students and finally academic reputation from the US News & World Report that comes out each year," Russell said. "Our research department mixes all that stuff together and calculates the best schools."
This is the first year the magazine released a list ranking engineering schools alongside medical and business schools from across the nation.
The program was started in 1998 with support from a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and since then 113 minority students have participated, said Barbara O'Kelly, coordinator of the program.
O'Kelly said MSU's status as the only Big Ten university to appear on the list will encourage future enrollment.
"Big Ten schools turn out an awful lot of the Ph.D.s in the country," she said.
"Being the only one in the ranking means we compete and will encourage some very good students to look at Michigan State."
Although Barba said he wasn't surprised that the engineering school entered the minority list, it had a geographical disadvantage to other schools on the list.
"At the University of Texas the minority is white people - 90 percent is Hispanic - so that is misleading," he said. "Michigan being in the Midwest has more merit. This is more of an achievement."
Pierre said the program will continue its work to recruit and retain minority members.
"The nation needs these people," he said. "We will continue to try to be as productive in the future as we have in the past."
Maggie Lillis can be reached at lillima@msu.edu
