Understanding and Expanding College Students' Perceptions of Computing's Social Impact

Research has found that college students who believe that computing can benefit society tend to report a higher sense of belonging. This is additionally true for students who endorse the goal of helping society; students who identify as first-generation college students, women, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx/Latin*, and/or Asian are more likely to endorse this goal. People from these groups are also more likely to endorse the goal of wanting to collaborate. To better understand how students decide if computing can be used to benefit society and whether it involves collaboration, we conducted interviews with 29 college students. Contrary to previous research, our partici-pants universally expressed the belief that computing can help society and cited the ubiquitous impact of computing as evidence. However, students were also wary that profit is the primary motivator of many large technology companies. Our participants generally also believed that computing involves collaboration, which may be the result of most of our participants attending an institution that emphasizes collaboration. We propose that educators provide examples of positive social impact beyond computing's contribution to modern conveniences as a way to expand students' perceptions of the work possible in the field. Towards that goal, we provide 12 examples. Influencing students' perception of computing as having positive social impact and collaboration may be an effective initiative to broaden participation and promote belonging. That is, interventions to shift students' perception of computing may complement additional efforts to address structural inequality and discrimination that limit participation in computing.