Buoyed by Align success, CIC shares master’s bridge program, gender diversity lessons with other colleges

CIC executive directors Carla Brodley (left) and Catherine Gill.

When Carla Brodley took over as dean of Khoury College in 2014, Northeastern’s Align program was still in its infancy — a one-semester master’s bridge for students who had completed an undergraduate STEM degree.

After several iterations of reimagining and tweaking, Align arrived as a two-semester program that welcomed students of all backgrounds, from art history to journalism to business to biology. As a result, Align saw both an enrollment spike and a radical shift in demographics, especially from female applicants. Ever since, Align has been nationally recognized as a model CS master’s bridge program for its curriculum, for its professional pathways, and also for how it has brought students of different backgrounds and experience levels to the often-gated CS field.

Since its founding in 2019, the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) at Northeastern, co-led by Carla Brodley and Catherine Gill, has used that expertise to support more than 40 universities in designing and launching their own master’s bridge programs through the MS Pathways to Computing Consortium. Based on that work, in 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the CIC a three-year contract to consult with universities building their bridge programs to a master’s degree in cybersecurity, an area of computing that struggles even more with demographic diversity.

“The idea of the Align program was to provide a new pathway into computer science,” Brodley said. “Once we opened it up to majors of any sort, we observed how interested both students and employers were, and the program started to take off. Now we’ve been doing this for a decade, and we understand what makes a bridge program successful and how to scale it.”

Bridge consulting is just one of many CIC initiatives that advance best practices in inclusive computer science education, and it’s an area that naturally links back to Align and to Brodley. According to Gill, Align’s continued success helps fuel the CIC’s work.

“We’re not replicating the Align program but Align is what motivates us and gives the CIC the credibility to do the work,” Gill said. “Northeastern has one of the largest bridge programs in the country. We have 2,000 students, and it has been reliably over 50% women for six years now. So, we have insight into what it takes — at scale — to bring students from every background and make them viable for jobs in computer science.”

In 2021, the CIC began conversations with the NSF about helping other universities develop bridge programs, particularly for cybersecurity. The NSF’s interest stemmed from a desire to broaden the applicant pool of their CyberCorps Scholarships for Service program (SFS), which funds cybersecurity degrees. For every year that an SFS scholar receives NSF support, they work in a federal cyber job after graduating.

READ: CyberCorps SFS scholar Owen Seltzer scans, secures, and boosts NASA’s networks

The CIC felt that its approach — a student-centric, well-structured bridge — would adapt well to the SFS context. The NSF agreed and funded Bridge to Cyber, a three-year CIC effort to support universities in developing and launching their bridge programs. The CIC’s process includes vetting the schools and then working with those that are selected to clarify their target audience, develop their curriculum, and attract students.

The first cohort of seven Bridge to Cyber schools launched in summer 2023, and the CIC is finalizing the second cohort now. These schools arrive at the CIC’s doorstep at different phases in their program development, and some need more help than others.

“Some schools are super early, where they say, ‘This is a twinkle in our eye. We know that we have to do something, but we’re still in the design phase,’” Gill said. “The second one is implementation, which is ‘We have something, but it’s informal and we need to formalize it.’ And then the third stage is enhancement, which is ‘We have a bridge, and we’ve got proof of concept, but it’s not fully developed. Maybe it’s just an asynchronous module that students plow through, and we want to make it into a full program.’”

That expansion requires an optimal course structure in terms of content and rigor, something that took Brodley and Align leaders several iterations to formulate and balance. The solution, Brodley said, is to prepare students for master’s studies specifically — not replicate introductory undergraduate courses at the master’s level.

“We think about what concepts are needed for success in a graduate program,” Brodley said. “An example is that some concepts in the ‘Algorithms’ class are easy to understand the first time. So, although they are often covered in entry-level undergraduate algorithms courses, they do not need to be part of the bridge curriculum because students will see them again at the graduate level.”

By prioritizing specific areas of study and tightening the curriculum, the CIC works with schools to right-size the coursework into a manageable load for students. This balance between accessibility and rigor is the backbone of a successful bridge program.

“When we come into a new school, often administrators’ instincts are to make the bridge a gatekeeper, and almost unfairly hard,” Gill explained. “So, in that case, we’ll start the conversation by asking, ‘Is our goal to bring people in, or to keep people out?’ At Northeastern, we have a four-class bridge and it takes commitment, but it’s super doable and it’s achievable by anybody who knows how to study. If you have the time management skills, you can do it.”

In addition, building a bridge program requires finding new ways to recruit students — whether they are professionals seeking a career pivot, students who found a CS spark in undergraduate electives, or anyone else whose tech journey isn’t a straightforward path.

“We have a lot of conversations around how universities alter and update their marketing and recruiting muscles to speak to somebody who may not yet have the language in their head of what you’re offering,” Gill said. “You’re selling something to somebody that they don’t know they need because they don’t know it exists.”

In addition to the cybersecurity bridge project, the CIC will continue to use its experience to enhance bridge programs across the country, and in doing so, break down barriers in the CS field.

“We have codified what it takes to make a bridge program, with really good published data showing that it works,” Brodley said. “My hope is that any school that wanted to build this would understand exactly what they needed to do, so that this movement could continue with the master’s in computer science, data science, and cybersecurity just like an MBA — something anyone can do after college, no matter what undergraduate degree they had.”

Subscribe to Khoury News