The design of Duke University’s Office of Biomedical Graduate Diversity reflects the work that has gone into understanding the student experience, particularly that of underrepresented minorities, and why they are less likely to enter graduate school, more likely to drop out, and less likely to aspire to academic careers.
Doctoral candidates who come from underrepresented groups are far less likely than their peers to have parents with advanced degrees. And minority students in general are less likely to attend selective colleges, meaning that the inner workings and unwritten rules of doctoral education may be less familiar to them. That may help explain why they take on greater debt and are less likely to secure research fellowships than white students are, which can affect career choices later.
“An undergraduate professor of mine told me that if I have to pay for graduate school, I’m not doing it right. I didn’t know that,” says Kristina L. Zeiser, a senior researcher at the American Institutes of Research, and an author of “The Price of a Science PhD,” a report that breaks down student-debt levels by race, ethnicity, and gender. “If underrepresented minorities are not getting that kind of guidance at the undergraduate level, maybe that’s why we’re seeing these disparities.”
Poor mentoring, feelings of isolation, and a difference in value systems have also been shown to discourage minority students from finishing their graduate degrees or pursuing careers in higher education.
One of the newer areas of study in recent years involves the question of personal values. A survey of 1,500 recent biomedical-Ph.D. recipients found that those from underrepresented groups were less interested in pursuing an academic career at a research institution than their white and Asian peers were. The authors of the report found that many minority students were turned off by university research culture, in which individual achievement is prized and the greatest rewards go to those who publish in elite journals and secure grants.
Minority scholars are more likely to want to pursue careers that serve their communities, says one of the authors, Kimberly A. Griffin, an associate professor in the department of counseling, higher education, and special education at the University of Maryland at College Park. If they pursue academic careers, it is more often with the idea that their research and teaching can provide positive influences on others, including people in the communities they came from. The lesson here, she says, “is that some things that don’t seem to be related to race, related to identity, might be actually related to identity after all.”
Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, associate director for research and policy at the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education, experienced some of these issues firsthand. She received her undergraduate degree in planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she felt she belonged, being among a diverse group of students.
Some things that don’t seem to be related to race, related to identity, might be actually related to identity after all.
But she had a number of negative experiences as one of the few black women in her Ph.D. program at the California Institute of Technology. That included being stopped regularly by security guards when she wanted to use her lab on the weekends, she says, and being the only student in her research group who was advised to retake her physics sequence — even though she got A’s and B’s as an undergraduate.
Once she tried to explain to her research group how she felt that race made her experiences different. “I was told science is science, and race has nothing to do with it,” she recalls.
Ms. Malcom-Piqueux decided that the credibility she stood to gain among her peers as a scientist wasn’t worth the personal cost of continuing in her doctoral program. Rather, her experience strengthened her interest in studying the pathways for minority students in STEM fields, and she decided to pursue a doctorate in higher education at the University of Southern California, where she earned her degree in 2008.
A spokeswoman for Caltech noted that the university had developed diversity initiatives in recent years to address the challenges faced by students and postdoctoral scholars from underrepresented minorities. The efforts include discussion groups, mentorship, clubs, and counseling. Since 2014, the university has also been part of the California Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, a National Science Foundation-supported program for minority students and postdocs in STEM fields.
Changing the culture of research universities is, of course, a daunting task. But Kenneth D. Gibbs Jr., a program analyst at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences who does research on graduate and postdoctoral training and diversity in the biomedical sciences, notes that newer approaches in national funding programs to diversify the scientific work force have begun to shift attention from focusing on what students lack — such as resources or academic preparation — and more on what aspects of science education and research training help or hinder students from underrepresented groups.
One of Duke’s key programs, for example, the Biosciences Collaborative for Research Engagement, is supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, which encourages community building and mentoring programs to ensure that minority students feel that they belong.
“I think we recognize that skills are important,” says Mr. Gibbs, who is another of the authors of the study on biomedical students. “But skills are only one piece of the thing.”
Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
