It’s not news that black, Hispanic, and Native American Ph.D. students complete doctoral programs at lower rates than do their Asian and white counterparts. Comprehensive efforts to measure and improve racial disparities in Ph.D. attrition and completion rates have been tried for decades.
But the Council of Graduate Schools is announcing today an effort that it hopes will attack the problem in a new way. The council is awarding grants of $30,000 to 21 institutions, which will participate in a qualitative investigation of the experiences of minority graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, commonly referred to as STEM fields. Backed by a three-year, $1.5-million grant from the National Science Foundation, the effort is designed to fill in key gaps in understanding about the factors that influence whether those students complete their degrees.
“We know that attrition rates from doctoral programs average between 40 and 50 percent, and minorities tend to complete at even lower rates,” said Debra W. Stewart, the council’s president. “Institutions are strongly motivated to reduce attrition, but it isn’t clear which interventions make the most difference for minority students.”.
Over the last 20 years, many institutional programs and federal efforts have sought to increase the participation of minorities in STEM fields. The most-recent data from the National Science Foundation show that minorities’ shares of science and engineering bachelor’s and master’s degrees have been rising since the late 1980s.
But minority students’ shares of doctorates in those fields have improved only modestly and have flattened out since 2000. Data from the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering show that black, Native American, and Hispanic people together account for 34 percent of the total U.S. population, but they earn only 7 percent of master’s degrees and 3 percent of doctorates in STEM fields.
The project builds on work already under way at the Council of Graduate Schools on Ph.D. completion and attrition, and it seeks to answer several “major research questions": What are the completion and attrition rates among minorities at the participating institutions? Do the rates vary by field of study, gender, race, and ethnicity? Have they changed over time?
A National Concern
The underrepresentation of minority students in STEM fields is a national concern to officials at the graduate-school council and the NSF for a number of reasons. The United States is faced with an aging STEM faculty and nonacademic work force that will need to be replaced at the same time interest in STEM fields appears to be waning among all students.
And, perhaps most significantly, demographic projections show that the country is rapidly changing. The U.S. Census Bureau has projected that by 2023 half of all children will be nonwhite, with that proportion reaching 60 percent by 2050. If the United States is to remain competitive in a global economy, the graduate-schools council and NSF officials say, institutions need to do more to nurture talent among an increasingly diverse group of students.
Despite small gains in minority enrollments in doctoral programs over the past several decades, “many qualified minority students are choosing not to pursue STEM graduate degrees,” said Jessie A. DeAro, the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program officer at NSF. “This could be for a number of reasons, such as a lack of sense of belonging in STEM, inadequate mentorship, family responsibilities, or a lack of information on how to pay for graduate school.” Ms. DeAro said that she hopes the project will help people better understand what those reasons are and what interventions need to be made.
The institutions that will be participating in the project reflect a cross-section of universities that already receive money through NSF’s Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, or AGEP, program and others that do not. The program was established in 1998 to facilitate the recruitment, retention, and advancement of racial groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM fields in academe and the work force.
In 1998, there were hopes that the AGEP program would be a game changer, and the numbers of minority students enrolling in STEM doctoral programs have increased over time at the institutions receiving funds from the program. The council is interested in seeing if there are differences in the graduation and retention rates of minority doctoral students at AGEP and non-AGEP institutions. The council also wants to understand which of the 21 institutions under study have the most positive effect on doctoral completion.
Over the next three years, each participating institution will use the grant money to collect data on attrition and completion for all minority students entering all STEM doctoral programs from 1992 through 2012. The institutions will also administer Web-based surveys to minority students, and the graduate-schools council will make campus visits to hold focus groups with students and interviews with faculty and deans.
Dropping out of graduate school may not be an indicator of a program’s failure to support minority students. The council’s qualitative method is expected to not only shed light on institutional support, but also shed light on individual student circumstances, such as financial difficulties, family obligations, and student responses to the job market.
“We’re trying to get at the factors that negatively impact student outcomes to mitigate or remove them,” Ms. DeAro said. “We also want to identify the positive factors and share those with others so that the impact can be multiplied.”
Ms. DeAro said that the council is one of the few organizations with the research capacity and reputation to collect the extensive data required for this study from graduate schools because of its past success with the Ph.D. completion project.
Role of Minority-Serving Institutions
But will the council’s new project reveal anything new? And will institutions be able or willing to make significant changes that will yield better outcomes?
William B. Harvey, who is a dean at the School of Education at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and a national expert in diversity efforts in higher education, is skeptical because none of the institutions receiving grant money are historically black colleges. The council’s study is taking the “usual approach,” he said, to looking at the problem of minority attrition.
“It’s disturbing that North Carolina A&T is not on the list because we graduate more black undergraduates who earn degrees in engineering and go off to complete Ph.D. programs in the STEM fields than any institution in the country,” Mr. Harvey said. “When we are talking about the realities of demographic changes in this country and addressing racial disparities, then we have to pay attention to the institutions that have historically graduated black degree holders.”
Mr. Harvey said the moment is ripe to make fundamental changes. But, over time, he said, various studies and recommendations have often had limited effects because faculty and administrators have not had the will to change.
A news-media spokeswoman for the graduate-schools council said that the council broadly disseminated information about the grant and how to apply to its member institutions, which include historically black graduate institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions. Two of the grant recipients are Hispanic-serving institutions; they are Florida International University and New Mexico State University.
Ms. Stewart said that she is delighted by the number of Hispanic-serving institutions that received grants. The council, she said, cannot comment about the pool of applicants or why any particular applicant did not receive a grant.
The program sponsors hope that this study will make a difference and provide road maps for colleges to strengthen diversity efforts. “Through analysis of data, both quantitative and qualitative, we will create a tool kit of key policies and practices that have been shown to increase completion and reduce attrition rates of underrepresented minority students,” said Ms. Stewart. She added, “Given changing demographics in the United States, the findings from this initiative will only become more important in the years to come.”
The grant-winning universities are: Brown University, Drexel University, Florida International University, Florida State University, Loyola University at Chicago, New Mexico State University, North Carolina State University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Central Florida, the University of Georgia, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Iowa, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University (joint proposal), the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the University of South Florida.
Correction (3/15, 4:02 p.m.): Because of incorrect information provided by the Council of Graduate Schools, this article originally misstated which recipients of the new grants are Hispanic-serving institutions. They are Florida International and New Mexico State Universities. Texas A&M University and the University of California at Irvine are not Hispanic-serving institutions. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
