Reversing the Implosion: An Analysis of AIA and Collateral Data to Develop Effective IDP Incentives to Increase the Demographic Diversity of our Profession
The Problem
The architectural profession is imploding. About 101,000 Americans currently hold NCARB licenses to practice architecture. Each year, about 3500 of these licensed practitioners leave the profession through retirement, death, or to pursue other interests. Yet in recent years fewer than 1500 new architects have become licensed each year across the United States, a number that has declined from about 4000 a decade ago. The architectural profession is now shrinking at a rate of about 1.5 to 2% every year.
Some licensed practitioners argue that producing fewer architects helps their business prospects. But this myopic view ignores the reality that the percentage of architectural involvement in designing and constructing the built environment has steadily declined to less than 20% of all work undertaken in America. Similarly, some architectural educators argue that the decline of graduates entering “traditional” practitioner paths merely acknowledges an increased multiplicity of positive alternative design career paths taken by design school graduates. Both practitioners and academics have argued at AIA national and Large Firm Roundtable conferences, and at ACSA and NCARB-sponsored meetings, that the current Intern Development Program (IDP) does little to encourage design school graduates to become licensed practitioners.
IDP is intended to bridge the gap between our increasingly theoretical design school pedagogies, and the substantially greater pragmatic requirements that practitioners must now meet to be licensed. As our design schools have trended toward privileging pedagogical models of design theory over pedagogies favoring pragmatic design for specified clients, the theories taught in our schools have diverged dramatically from the pragmatic obligations new graduates encounter as they enter practice. Additionally, what one learns in the IDP process bears little resemblance to the theories one studies in our highly regarded architectural programs.
We believe that this drift toward theory in design education has discouraged many more diverse, pragmatically oriented aspiring professionals from entering our profession. In the early 1970s, many women and minorities entered our profession because of schools’ pragmatic, community-based efforts to improve cities and individual homes, and because they passionately believed they could pragmatically “make a difference” in the lives of actual individuals. Today these aging pragmatic idealists are a large part of the 20% of women and about 8% of the minorities who make up our profession.
If architecture is to maintain its current numbers of licensed professionals, we must do more to recruit, educate, mentor, and nurture toward licensure the more diverse groups that now represent the American population, and, we must develop ways of making the IDP process more relevant to the aspirations of these groups, which we believe, from anecdotal evidence, to have proven themselves more interested in pursuing pragmatic careers within architecture than theory-based paths. This research tests the hypothesis that the current IDP internship process, by failing to adequately connect academic theories to the pragmatic vicissitudes of professional practice, actually discourages women and minorities from becoming licensed practicing professionals. By thoroughly examining, for the first time, the voluminous demographic data collected from thousands of respondents to a 2004-05 AIA-sponsored national survey and face-to-face interviews, this research seeks to determine specifically what might encourage more women and minorities to complete the IDP and become licensed practicing professionals.
The Proposed Research
This research will employ research assistants in two East Coast locations to systematically read, code, and analyze the thousands of qualitative responses collected in several 2003-2005 AIA and collateral studies on IDP participants, and others seeking to enter our profession. The detailed statistical data and qualitative responses to these thorough surveys and interviews on how and why individuals chose to enter the architectural profession, or not, were undertaken by architectural oversight organizations, and by ArchVoices. This data has yet to be systematically analyzed and cross-correlated. This new research project will complete the work previously started by others, in order to produce a definitive analysis of the role of IDP in encouraging or discouraging women and minorities from entering our profession.
Although some of the responses have previously been roughly codified, they have not been thoroughly analyzed by the studies’ original researchers. This new research will cross-correlate the collaterals’ data employing pre-existing statistical research software, and verify and disseminate the findings throughout the design and educational communities interested in practice-based learning, and internship efficacy.
We will test the proposition that within these extensive responses is evidence of the learning expectations of emerging professional practitioners as they consider participating in internships, and of the effects of that IDP participation on emerging professionals’ determination to actually become licensed. From this, the researchers believe recommendations can be developed to improve the efficacy of IDP in encouraging more diverse design school graduates to actually become licensed practicing professionals.