Miss America Goes to Washington

by Alan Neuhauser

Call it a meeting of the old and the beautiful.

Members of Congress and Education Secretary Arne Duncan met with Miss America Nina Davuluri this week to talk science, technology, engineering and math education. The Miss America Foundation and Davuluri – herself a science grad from the University of Michigan – have made STEM learning one of their platforms. When the annual pageant returns in September, it will for the second time offer a range of STEM scholarships to its contestants. 

“Sixty percent of the contestants on the Miss America stage were involved in STEM-related fields: PT school, PA school, engineers,” she says, referring to schools for physical therapists and physicians assistants. “If you enter in this organization, you walk away with some form of scholarship money.” Davuluri began competing in beauty pageants to pay for college, she says. Having been named Miss Michigan’s Outstanding Teen in 2006, Miss Syracuse and Miss New York in 2013, and Miss America last September, she’s won about $92,000 – allowing her, with help from her parents, to graduate debt-free.

“I had no means to pay for school aside from student loans, so I started competing,” Davuluri tells U.S. News during an interview on Capitol Hill. “This is not the only way to earn a scholarship and it’s not for everyone. This is a creative way to do it.” Schools and employers have long struggled to attract women and minorities. While women made up more than half of the country’s college-educated workers in 2010, for example, they comprised only 28 percent of the science and engineering workforce, the National Science Board found earlier this year. Meanwhile, blacks, Latinos, American Indians and Alaskan Natives accounted for just 10 percent of science and engineering workers. Asians made up 19 percent. Davuluri, who is Indian-American and the daughter of a physician father and computer-programmer mother, declined to speculate how discrimination and social pressures may discourage women from entering those fields.

“I can’t say I know one particular case,” she tells U.S. News, adding, “I never experienced anything in terms of not being encouraged to go into a STEM field.” She suggested, though, that students, guidance counselors, parents and lawmakers could look more broadly at what a science or technology job might encompass. “Thinking outside the box of what STEM is is something that I’ve been really trying to encourage this year,” she says. Davuluri pointed to her visit to a cosmetics factory, where she learned to make her own lip gloss. “I think a lot of times, we are in those confines of engineer, computer programmer,” she says. “Oftentimes young girls can’t think outside the box of what STEM is.” And that goes for tuition, too: “The cost of a higher education is astronomically expensive,” she says. Paying for it, she continues, “doesn’t have to be what you think might be the normal way.”