A National Science Foundation fellowship program intended to expand the ranks of minority sociologists is succeeding in its goal of promoting scholarship on race and ethnicity, but it is faring much less well in getting minority graduate students on what is widely regarded as their ideal career track, according to a new report from the American Sociological Association.
The report, released here on Saturday at the association’s annual conference, says the race of a graduate student’s primary mentor appears to have a significant influence on that student’s career trajectory. Mentors who are white and male generally are much less inclined to encourage students to write dissertations focused on race or ethnicity, but they are more likely than mentors who are minority or female to usher graduate students in sociology onto a career track that is likely to lead to a tenured position at a top-level research institution, known as “Research I.”
Recipients of doctorates in sociology who had white males as mentors in their graduate programs were significantly more likely than their peers to be on track for tenure. And minority fellows with such mentors were about three times as likely as other minority fellows to obtain academic positions on the “ideal” track, the report says.
Drawing upon the work of other researchers, the report suggests that, at least at Research I institutions, white, male mentors are more likely than others to have contacts and connections that help them advance the careers of students they have taken under their wings.
‘Ideal’ vs. ‘Alternative’ Paths
The study described in the report examined 13 years of cohorts of Ph.D. recipients who either participated in the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program or received one of the National Science Foundation’s Dissertation Improvement Grants in Sociology. The participants in the two programs, which are highly selective and seek to train people for successful academic careers, were compared, in terms of their career trajectories through tenure, both with one another and with a random national sample of doctorate recipients from sociology departments across the United States.
The study examined two types of career trajectories, designated as an “ideal” career path and an “alternative” one.
The “ideal” career path, which is assumed to be the model for graduate training and the career path into which graduate students are socialized, starts in a Research I graduate program. It leads to employment in a tenure-track position, followed by tenure, at a Research I institution, and involves scholarly presentations, external grants, and scholarly productivity in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles and books, the report says.
In looking at sociology’s “alternative” career path, the study considered three types of career trajectories: a nonacademic or applied career that includes research positions, administrative positions, self-employment, and employment at nonprofit organizations; an academic career at a historically black college or other minority-serving institution; and a tenured or a tenure-track position at a college other than a Research I institution.
All of the study’s subjects received their doctorates in the academic years from 1996-7 to 2008-9. Among them were 108 minority fellows, 266 NSF grant recipients (most of whom were white), and 158 randomly drawn recipients of sociology doctorates who became the study’s control group.
Who Went Where
Most of the minority fellows in the study, with the exception of those who attended Research I institutions, were significantly less likely than the other Ph.D. recipients in the study to have “ideal” careers and significantly more likely to have “alternative” ones.
Of the three groups of Ph.D. recipients studied, 72 percent of the NSF grant recipients, 61 percent of those in the control group, and 60 percent of the minority fellows had moved into academic positions by 2010. Of those who had taken academic positions, 57 percent of NSF grant recipients, 27 percent of those from the control group, and 22 percent of the minority fellows had obtained positions at Research I institutions.
The minority fellows also were substantially less likely than NSF grant recipients to earn tenure within seven years of obtaining their Ph.D.'s, to have published at least one article in one of the top three journals in their field, or to have received NSF grants after graduation, although they fared better than members of the control group when it came to earning tenure or NSF grants after graduation.
Although some minority fellows may deliberately choose alternative careers, the report says its authors are not convinced this is always the case, especially given that those who attended Research I institutions were more likely to be on the “ideal” track.
One especially bright spot for the Minority Fellowship Program was its success in promoting scholarship on the intersection of race and ethnicity with other sociological factors. The report says almost 70 percent of the program’s fellows wrote their dissertations on such subjects, compared with 18 percent of NSF grant recipients and 25 percent of those in the control group.
The share of minority fellows who wrote dissertations dealing heavily with race and ethnicity may even be higher than shown by the study’s findings, the report says, “because there is anecdotal evidence that some advisers may suggest that their Ph.D. students ‘hide’ the race-and-ethnicity aspect of their work in their dissertation titles for job-market or other reasons.”
Mentors and Dissertation Topics
The study defined a graduate student’s mentor as his or her primary dissertation adviser. In discussing the role that various types of mentors played in graduate students’ long-term success, the report says the study included too few minority mentors to meaningfully examine the results for specific races and ethnicities, so the researchers instead compared results for white mentors with those for mentors from all minority groups considered together.
The report offers several possible explanations for the finding that among all the Ph.D. recipients examined in the study, those who had white, male mentors were less likely than others to focus on topics related to race and ethnicity
One possibility is that such mentors may feel they do not know enough about research on race or ethnicity to sit on the dissertation committee of a student focused in those areas. Or mentors may be more likely than others to believe that writing about race or ethnicity makes a student less likely to achieve an ideal career. Yet another possible explanation: Some graduate students may seek out white, male mentors because they do not want to do dissertations focusing on race and ethnicity and want mentors whose expertise lies elsewhere.
The report, “The Impact of Cross-Race Mentoring for ‘Ideal’ and ‘Alternative’ Ph.D. Careers in Sociology,” was written by Patricia E. White, a program director for sociology at the National Science Foundation, and by three researchers at the American Sociological Association: Olga V. Mayorova, a senior research associate; Jean H. Shin, director of the association’s minority-affairs program, and Roberta M. Spalter-Roth, director of the association’s department of research and development. Although the study was financed by the NSF’s sociology program, the views expressed in the report do not represent the views of the NSF, the paper says.
