Getting Minority Ph.D. Students to the Finish Line

Rolando de Santiago felt overwhelmed when he started a doctoral program in mathematics.

He had so many questions: How would he manage his time? Pick his research adviser? Find the money to travel to conferences? “I felt like I needed something to keep my head above water.” he says.

His department, at the University of Iowa, threw him a flotation device: a mentor.

For about two decades now, Iowa has paired each new minority Ph.D. student with a professor who watches out for the student’s personal and professional well-being. Talented graduate students often fall through the cracks, the thinking goes, and having another set of eyes on a student (who, later in the program, will also have a primary research adviser) can improve the chances for success.

How to Keep Minority Doctoral Students on Track

To improve retention and help diversify the future professoriate, some colleges embrace formal mentoring programs.

• How to Be an Ally to New Minority Scholars
• Mentoring the Mentors

Many colleges encourage faculty members to mentor doctoral students, but few programs have institutionalized the practice as strongly as Iowa’s math department has. The department began its mentoring program to help diversify its graduate-student body but has since expanded it to all incoming doctoral students. Colleges have come under increasing pressure recently from activists to hire more black and Hispanic faculty members, and expanding the pool of doctoral recipients is seen as a critical piece of that pipeline.

National data, however, show the complexity of the challenge. In some disciplines, only a handful of minority scholars earned Ph.D.s in 2015, meaning that departments must compete for a small number of job candidates. In math and computer science, for example, black students earned just 53 — or 3.2 percent — of the doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, according to the national Survey of Earned Doctorates. Hispanic students earned 75 doctorates, or 4.5 percent. While their numbers have grown over the past 20 years, both groups remain significantly underrepresented in academe, and the diversity gap is wider in math than in higher education over all. Black students earned 6.5 percent of doctorates in all disciplines, while Hispanics earned 7 percent.

Attracting minority students into doctoral programs is only half the battle, and perhaps the easier part. Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students tend to drop out at greater rates than their white and Asian counterparts. Researchers believe that fears of being stereotyped and so-called impostor syndrome (the belief that one doesn’t belong in a particular setting) hit minority students harder.

The Iowa math department’s gains have been compelling. Over the past 15 years, it has produced 35 black, Hispanic, or American Indian Ph.D. recipients — roughly 7 percent of all math doctorates awarded to those groups nationally during that time, says Philip C. Kutzko, a professor who led the mentoring drive. Perhaps even more noteworthy, he says, the gap in retention and completion rates between minority and white students has been eliminated.

The department’s experience holds many lessons about how to diversify doctoral programs and faculties, including the need for proactive recruiting and financial support that frees students to focus on their studies. But while those are critical factors, Mr. Kutzko says, “I would argue it’s the mentoring that made the difference from the beginning.”

Starting a doctoral program can be rough for even the best-prepared student. But for students like Mr. de Santiago, who is in the fourth year of his program, the transition is especially fraught.

Mr. de Santiago, who says he was not encouraged by his family to pursue college, pushed through community college and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona en route to his doctoral program, while cobbling together various jobs. He arrived in Iowa not knowing things that many of his peers took for granted. He wondered, for example, whether his program would just be a more intensive version of his undergraduate and master’s programs, and didn’t understand what, besides coursework, it involved.

During half-hour weekly meetings, his mentor, Mr. Kutzko, helped him fill in those blanks. Mr. Kutzko, who is white, thought back warmly to his own experience as a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s. Professors would take him out for beers or handball and they’d talk math, but they’d also discuss how he was doing in the program.

“The academy did that very well when we had a homogeneous male population — this is to say, a good-old-boy network,” he says. “That has to be done intentionally when you cross ethnic and gender backgrounds. Especially gender backgrounds. You don’t go out and have a beer. You have to think of how to achieve that same goal, which is almost being a ‘spirit guide.’ That’s how we see mentoring.”

The process of matching graduate students with mentors at Iowa begins even before a student arrives on the campus. The department, which has 34 tenured or tenure-track professors and seven lecturers, has a committee of faculty members who discuss how best to attract and retain minority doctoral students. They try to figure out which professor would be the best fit, based on a student’s academic and personal interests. For some students, it’s this culture of support, more than the mentoring itself, that proved most helpful.

The department holds a daily afternoon coffee-and-cookie break, for example, which brings together faculty members and graduate students for informal chatting. “Walking into the lounge and finding 10 students from various years sitting there and helping a first-year was not uncommon,” says Syvillia A. Averett, who earned her Ph.D. in 2012. “That culture is really what got all of us through, and it got passed down from year to year.”

The program, says Ms. Averett, now an assistant professor at the College of Coastal Georgia, succeeded in doing what many others have failed to do: Persuade enough faculty members to embrace the diversity effort. “The faculty buy-in is the biggest thing,” she says. Mr. Kutzko says one of his key mentoring goals is to ensure that students consider all career options — something that minority and first-generation students often don’t do. Mr. de Santiago, for one, started his doctoral program with plans to be a high-school teacher back in Los Angeles, the only place he had lived before packing up a U-Haul and driving to Iowa City. He never imagined a life in research or academe.

His mentoring sessions with Mr. Kutzko changed that. The professor saw a star mathematician in his mentee, and persuaded him that he could handle complicated research that many others could not. So Mr. de Santiago chose as his thesis adviser a professor with an intimidating reputation for rigorous research.

While few programs provide the structured support that Iowa does, mentoring in academe is seeing something of a renaissance. It’s not unusual to see doctoral programs, like Stanford University’s in biosciences, nudge students to seek out a variety of mentors in addition to their primary research advisers. And the National Institutes of Health recently financed an ambitious effort to create a national mentoring network.

The reliance on multiple mentors “is really where the field is moving,” says Christine Pfund, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies mentoring. “The system should never have been set up to assume any single individual could serve all the roles that a trainee would need.”

That’s a view another Iowa institution has also embraced. Craig Ogilvie, an assistant dean in the Graduate College at Iowa State University, learned that students from underrepresented groups were dropping out of Ph.D. programs at greater rates than white and Asian students were, especially in the first two years. He wanted to make sure that students had someone guide them through the difficult transition of moving to an overwhelmingly white state and starting a graduate program.

So in 2011, Iowa State began pairing each minority candidate with both a faculty member from a different department and a fellow graduate student a few years ahead in the program. The goal, Mr. Ogilvie says, was to help mentees learn the “hidden curriculum” of a graduate program — unwritten rules of navigating departmental culture, such as how to find study groups and apply for fellowships.

It’s too soon to tell whether Iowa State’s mentoring will improve completion rates, but so far the percentage of minority students still in the program after four years has grown, Mr. Ogilvie says. The four-year retention rate for underrepresented students rose from 51 percent for the 2007-9 cohorts to 71 percent for the 2010-12 cohorts, he says.

Like Iowa State, the University of Iowa’s math department also emphasizes the importance of mentoring from the very start. Mr. de Santiago met with Mr. Kutzko once a week in his first year, less often his second, and hardly at all in his third and fourth years. “When I first started,” Mr. de Santiago says, “I thought I would be needing to see someone like Phil all the time. But I just naturally outgrew that relationship.”

That’s how it’s supposed to work, Mr. Kutzko says.

Mr. de Santiago’s relationship with his research adviser, meanwhile, initially took work on both their parts. But the adviser pushed him in his studies, and he went on to deliver presentations around the world and develop visibility in his research, a branch of mathematics with applications to representation theory and quantum mechanics. While his mentor offered advice on “personal stuff,” his research adviser gave him guidance on the job market and told him he would need a postdoctoral research position if he wanted to teach at a research university.

It paid off. Mr. de Santiago will still be going back to Los Angeles, but not to teach high school. He accepted a prestigious postdoc at the University of California at Los Angeles (and turned down a couple others at top research universities). The position puts him on track to become a math professor, his new goal. By the accounts of Mr. Kutzko and other faculty members, Mr. de Santiago, who received poor grades in high school, has developed into one of the department’s most promising doctoral students.

“I’ve stopped limiting my opportunities,” Mr. de Santiago says. “I’m going to keep pushing and see how far all this takes me.”

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The Minority Ph.D. Gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

In many STEM fields, the percentage of black and Hispanic students earning Ph.D.s remains below that of doctoral recipients overall.

Note: Includes only Ph.D. recipients who are American citizens or permanent residents. Data are for 2015, the latest year they are available.

*Respondents who reported more than one race or did not report race or ethnicity