Firms Extend ACE Student Links

The ACE Mentor program is rallying AEC firm support for a new effort to ensure more underrepresented engineering and construction students earn college degrees and start industry careers. University data show just 10% earned degrees, on average, with just 50% doing so at some universities in best-case scenarios.

Begun in January, the ACE Transformative Partners Task Force seeks to extend industry support, mentoring and internships to underrepresented college students “who comprise almost 70% of our scholarship recipients,” says Tom Laird, CEO of Gilbane Building Co., one of nine founding firms. They also include contractors Hensel Phelps, Barton Malow, Haskell and Mortenson, and engineers Stantec, Langan, HNTB and Terracon. Turner Construction and DPR also have joined, with all firms working initially with about 65 students.

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About 70% of ACE participants are students of color and 40% are women, says Mortenson CEO Dan Johnson. People of color now make up less than 10% of construction sector employees, and women less than 16.5%, he says. “Clearly there’s an opportunity in an industry now desperate for more people. The easiest way … is to dial up the percentages of people who have been excluded,” Johnson says.

“We felt we had connected with students in high school, but there was disconnect once they left,” says Steven Charney, chair of construction law firm Peckar & Abramson and task force co-chair, with Hensel Phelps CEO Mike Choutka. He points to student struggles with courses such as calculus and no support system to help them “stick with it … so they feel defeated and leave.” The ACE college link will make use of the group’s 70-chapter network but “organize that connection in a richer way,” says Charney, noting more intense tutoring and summer prep programs. Mortenson has hired 44 ACE Mentor graduates since 2018, the firm says, with projections for 23 this year.

High school senior Kenzley Adams changed her plan for an interior design major to pursuing a building design and construction BS degree when she starts this fall at Weber State University in Utah, crediting her ACE experience and a Hensel Phelps internship that included a rec center design project and an onsite tour of the firm’s 688,000-sq-ft Salt Lake City hotel set to open in October (above). Adams was impressed with seeing tradeswomen on the project, having access to women and other firm field professionals and the potential for more work experience.

Gilbane and Suffolk also are among funders of a separate pre-college STEM program in Boston to provide more Black and Latino students access to industry jobs, says Sarah Cherry Rice, executive director of Digital Ready, its nonprofit firm sponsor. She says only 47% of Black and 40% of Latino city public school students attend college after high school. Vocational education student and Haiti native Elinald Desroches, 18, graduates from Digital Ready classes in June, aiming to become an architect. “I would not have chosen architecture if this program were not available,” he says.

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