How a Coalition Seeks to Bring Minority Students Into Science

The Problem

Blacks and Hispanics drop out at higher rates than others

For decades, colleges have tried to raise the number of black, Hispanic, and other underrepresented minority students enrolled in science- and engineering-related Ph.D. programs and in the professoriate.

But success has been elusive. In the physical sciences, for example, federal data show blacks made up about 1 percent of doctoral recipients in 1992, and slightly more than 3 percent 20 years later. In that same field, Hispanics made up about 3 percent in 1992 and only 5 percent in 2012, the most recent year data are available. The percentages are similar in engineering.

Part of the problem is what some administrators describe as a “leaky pipeline.” At each step along the path from graduate school to the professoriate, including earning a Ph.D. or a postdoctoral position, underrepresented minority students either drop out or stop pursuing an academic career at greater rates than their white and Asian peers.

The Approach

Help students connect with minority faculty members

Supported by a $2.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation, four leading California universities—the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles—have formed an alliance to try to increase the number of minority researchers in science and engineering on their campuses, as well as at universities nationwide and federally supported science facilities.

The universities say getting minority students onto campus isn’t enough. Institutions must also foster a sense of community and belonging to keep the students from leaving. Doctoral programs are a breeding ground for self-doubt, and those feelings can get magnified when minority students don’t see any role models who look like them.

To combat that sense of isolation, members of the coalition, known formally as the California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, aim to create a “cross-institutional community” that essentially pools their collective resources.

A key part of the plan is to allow a minority doctoral student to connect with faculty mentors and work with lead researchers at other institutions within the group.

The Challenges

Students choose private-sector salaries

Factors beyond the control of administrators make the goal of diversifying the professoriate particularly tough.

For one, businesses are actively recruiting minority engineers and computer scientists, and a Ph.D. recipient from an elite institution is an attractive target.

It’s often hard for a student to pass on a company salary that may far outstrip university pay. Such financial concerns were a key factor for Peter Soler, a chemical-engineering Ph.D. student from Berkeley, in leaving academe. Though he would have liked to work at a university, he’s not sure if the path to academe is worth the sacrifice.

“I just got married last year and want to start a family in the next few years,” says Mr. Soler, who is Hispanic. “From an economic perspective, it doesn’t make sense to take a pay cut of a factor of three or four times my earning potential.”

Two months ago, Mr. Soler began working at Bristol-Myers Squibb in New Jersey.

Organizers aren’t naïve about such challenges, says Colette Patt, a Berkeley official who serves as director of the alliance.

“We’re not trying to steer every single student into a national lab or academia,” Ms. Patt says. “We’re trying to ensure that students are moving in far greater numbers into those sectors.”

The Results

Mentor matching, a joint postdoc program, and more

In addition to an annual retreat, the coalition started a more formal program to match minority students with professors in their areas of research. As part of this, it is offering travel stipends up to $1,000 for students to visit professors at other campuses.

The alliance has also created a joint postdoctoral application process so that applicants can be considered by all four institutions at once.

Over time, the institutions will track whether minority representation increases at national labs and in tenure-track positions at universities, and whether the program can improve retention at the various points in the pipeline. Students will also be surveyed to find out whether the program influences their career decisions.

The coalition’s members hope to send a message to academe: If four universities that compete fiercely with each other for talent and resources can band together to increase minority participation, others should too.

“At a time when industry is clamoring to bring in well-trained workers from other countries,” says Mark Richards, the principal investigator on the NSF grant, “leaving out such a large fraction of our own population is not merely a matter of social justice. It’s an economic imperative.”