10 Systemic Changes to Broaden Participation in Computing

The Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) launched in 2019 to partner with U.S. university computing departments to identify and remove barriers that prevent students from discovering and thriving in computing. We were given the unique opportunity to determine which interventions are most effective in removing these barriers, and to do so at a previously unheard of scale; as of this writing, the CIC is collaborating with over 100 of the largest U.S. computing departments in the U.S. We present here the results from 22 schools that began making changes to their undergraduate programs between 2020 and 2022. We will add to these data in time as we anticipate working with 30–40 additional schools on their undergraduate computing programs in the next 3–5 years. With this first set of results, we describe ten systemic, sustainable changes schools can make and how they can be adapted to different institutional contexts. We ground these discussions in evidence, showing the positive impact of implementation.