Efforts in education to improve the architecture pipeline

Earlier this summer, on the plane ride home from the 2022 AIA Conference on Architecture in Chicago, I was reflecting on the June 23rd keynote, a conversation between Jeanne Gang, Vishaan Chakrabarti, and Renee Cheng. The discussion focused at length on diversity in architecture, and more specifically diversity in the pipeline to the profession. The consensus across the stage was the need to make the profession attractive to younger children. “There are so many brains at work that aren’t even thinking that architecture is a potential career, or that they have agency to be an architect,” said Cheng. “How many young students have met an architect or thought about it as a career? Our job is to make it accessible.”

As a young female entering college to pursue a degree in architecture, I may have been the outlier as someone who had never met an architect growing up. My exposure probably

Above: Gender Representation shows improvement at most career stages with the highest growth in newly licensed architects. Image courtesy of NCARB.

Above: Over a 10 year period, people of color are more likely to stop pursuing licensure. Image courtesy of NCARB.

just looped back to watching HGTV a lot with my mother. I remember being very nervous that I would be the only girl in my architecture cohort when I walked into our studio space the first day of classes. I was wearing an oversized T-shirt with my sorority letters plastered across my chest. Every sorority did this at Texas A&M on the first day to have an excuse to talk to someone wearing the same shirt as an easy way to meet new people. To my surprise, when I walked in that day, I wasn’t the only one wearing some brightly colored T-shirt. There was another girl. I sat next to her and, as we talked, other girls started to trickle in. Today, the architecture program at Texas A&M is over 55% women.

While other universities are seeing the same increase in female students as Texas A&M, this isn’t seen when data reveals women only make up 24% of all licensed architects.1 The influx of women entering school does bode well for the profession, even if we must wait a few years for those students to graduate and enter the workforce. However, when focusing on licensure, 36% of those on the path to licensure do not complete the process. This number increases when looking at certain minority groups with 43% of African American and 40% of Hispanic or Latino candidates starting the process but not obtaining licensure.2

The Integrated Path to Licensure (IPAL) program aims to combat this by allowing students to receive their license upon graduation from an accredited degree program. Texas A&M University is starting its second year of offering students the option to apply for the IPAL program. When speaking with Dr. Valerian Miranda, the current IPAL & AXP Advisor for the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M, I learned that the initial interest exceeded his high hopes for the program. The process of getting approved to start an IPAL program requires close coordination between NCARB and the respective universities. Initially, the plan was for Texas A&M to slowly ramp up enrollment in the program, starting at five students the first year and progressing forward until they reached 20 new students per year.

“Well, so much for plans,” Dr. Miranda said. “Out of the second-year students, I had 13 who met and exceeded all the

application criteria. Then, I went to the incoming Master of Architecture class and about 15 of them already had NCARB records. When I met with them individually, I found two of them already had 3500 AXP hours and many others were in the 2500–3000 range.” It turns out, many of the students Dr. Miranda met with had taken a gap year before returning to get their accredited degree purely out of a need to work to pay for school. By getting the experience and then enrolling in an IPAL program once back at school, they are expected to test during their two years in the graduate program and graduate licensed. “We have tremendous support for our program from TBAE Texas Board of Architectural Examiners,” said Dr. Miranda. “It makes the profession of architecture more accessible for people of lesser financial means because you must work to earn AXP hours and in working you must get paid. That helps pay for school and get licensed faster. Inherently, this program is ideal for students of lesser means.”

In addition to being a positive impact for lower-income students, Dr. Miranda is confident in the long-term effects on diversity the profession will see from the program. The number of students that are currently enrolled in IPAL and are considered Hispanic, or a Person of Color, is nearly 3x the university average and over 65% are female. Dr. Miranda added, “I think that’s a great feather in the cap of this program. It is attracting female and minority students who are proving to be very committed to architecture.”

Two of the biggest critiques of the IPAL program are the fear that universities will begin to “teach to the test,” and that the experience students receive as interns isn’t the same as a full-time employee, which leads to less experienced architects entering the field. Dr. Miranda and I spoke a lot on this subject, as these are both concerns I had upon first hearing about the program. Personally, I think architecture education teaches us how to creatively problem solve and practicing architecture teaches us how to do the job; what we do every day in practice is very different from our typical studio work. This is where Dr. Miranda challenged me. He saw students bringing experience from their internships and applying that to their studio projects. The quality he saw from students, enrolled in IPAL or not, who had previous internship experience was notable. When I asked how he ensures that students are receiving valuable experience that will teach them how to be good architects, he stressed the importance of a good AXP supervisor.

“We have encountered this concern, and honestly expected it,” Dr. Miranda said. “When we send students to internships for their semester away and we check the students’ AXP hours, we can see how they’re progressing and if a student has all their hours in just one section, we know there’s a problem in the balance of their experience.” He turns the questions back to the firm, outlining that the firms who retain and recruit the best talent are those that see licensure as important and provide a support network for the students. “I tell my students, when you interview at a firm, turn the tables, and interview them also and ask what their policies and assistance toward licensure are. That is what is separating the best firms from the rest.”

While university programs such as the IPAL are hoping to improve diversity in the field, as Renee Cheng has said, there are plenty of students who don’t even realize that architecture is a major they should pursue. The pipeline to the profession starts much earlier than one’s freshman year at college. With the rise in popularity and research on the benefits of a science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education, many K-12 schools are exposing children to architecture and engineering earlier than ever before. This is supported even further through multiple professional organization efforts such as NOMA’s Project Pipeline, the ACE Mentor Program, and local AIA chapters’ Education Outreach committees, who put on K-12 summer camps and hold college fairs for prospective architecture students.

Whether the task at hand is supporting college interns by giving them meaningful project work, or reaching out to your local schools, the diversity in the field of architecture will not be improved without an honest effort by our current practitioners.

Footnotes: 1. 2021 NBTN Demographics: Career Stages & Licensure | NCARB – National Council of Architectural Registration Boards

2. NBTN 2022 Demographics | NCARB – National Council of Architectural Registration Boards

Paige Russell, AIA

Russell is an architect in the education studio at Corgan in Dallas, Texas. She serves on the AIA Dallas Emerging Professionals and Education Outreach Committees.