Most efforts to increase the number of black and other underrepresented minority doctoral recipients in science and engineering have fallen flat. For example, the share of engineering doctorates earned by black students remained unchanged, at 4 percent, from 2004 to 2014, according to the most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates.
The problem has many causes — including that most minority-group members enroll in graduate programs at lower rates than white students do — but many observers say a lack of good mentoring is a key factor.
Having better mentors, the thinking goes, would help minority students in the sciences and engineering navigate obstacles during their programs, reducing attrition. And if more of them earned doctorates, it also could help diversify faculties, which are under growing pressure to hire more black and other minority professors.
To improve mentoring, students are increasingly being connected with researchers and scientists from outside their colleges. The most ambitious effort, supported by a $21-million grant from the National Institutes of Health, aims to create a national database of potential mentors for minority graduate students and others, primarily in the biomedical sciences and related fields.
‘Faculty at many institutions have not been given any training on how to be a good mentor, especially a culturally responsive mentor.’
Those efforts are meant to complement, not replace, the relationship between a doctoral student and a primary research adviser. Doctoral students can’t rely only on their advisers for academic and career advice, advocates of outside mentoring say, because even the most well-meaning advisers have an inherent conflict of interest: They depend on the students for work, and the students depend on them for financing.
Being an adviser and being a mentor are two different things, says Jamboor K. Vishwanatha, a professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, who is leading the effort to create the database as part of the National Research Mentoring Network. Renowned scientific skill doesn’t always translate to gentle shepherding of young scientists, he says.
While some graduate programs are deliberate about training advisers to be mentors, many are not, and students even within the same department or lab can have far different experiences with their primary advisers. “Faculty at many institutions have not been given any training on how to be a good mentor, especially a culturally responsive mentor,” Mr. Vishwanatha says.
Mentor Match.com
The database that Mr. Vishwanatha is helping to build aspires to be something of a Match.com for academic mentoring. Participants fill out profiles and connect online, after which the students and their mentors are expected to spend about a half-hour per week for the next four months talking with each other about time management, career development, and related topics. The program went live in November, and about 400 mentors and 700 mentees have signed up so far.
While open to all students, minority or not, the effort aims to train mentors in “culturally responsive mentoring,” says Angela Byars-Winston, a counseling psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The training uses case studies and other methods to make mentors more aware of their own experiences so they can better advise people from different backgrounds.
Many scientists whom Ms. Byars-Winston knows are well-meaning but view concerns about the campus racial climate as outside their roles as research mentors. “Yet the students they are mentoring are living those experiences and came into that training environment with a different worldview because of those experiences,” she says. “The training environment does not provide space or room for affirmation of those issues.”
Aside from graduate students, the mentoring network is open to undergraduates, postdocs and even faculty members. The goal is to diversify the biomedical work force, but the network is open to students in the social sciences as well as all science and engineering disciplines.
Connecting students with outside mentors to improve diversity isn’t a new idea.
Connecting students with outside mentors to improve diversity isn’t a new idea. In 1997 a former dean at Dartmouth College created MentorNet to improve gender diversity in science and engineering fields. Graduate students and undergraduates were paired with mentors and would talk via email, a new form of communication at the time.
The site has helped students like Tiffany St. Bernard, a third-year Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering at Cornell University, who is a double minority in the sciences: an African-American woman.
Ms. Bernard’s dream of becoming a competitive figure skater faded after nearly two decades of training, so she was reluctant to commit five or six more years to another uncertain venture like a Ph.D.
But a biologist she met online in 2012 via MentorNet demystified doctoral education. She learned that in some programs, like the one at Cornell she eventually chose, passing a candidacy exam after two years would allow her to leave with a master’s degree — a comforting option — or continue on for a Ph.D. Newly informed, she entered the doctoral program. Her candidacy exam is scheduled for next month, and she has no plans to stop now.
Advocates of these mentoring relationships point to examples like Ms. St. Bernard’s as a sign of success, but aside from such anecdotal evidence, they acknowledge the paucity of data about the impact of mentoring as a tool to diversify the academic and scientific work force. The NIH has allocated funds to study the interactions and identify what works.
A recent study of the benefits of outside mentors has shown some promise, if limited. In a paper released last month, two researchers at Northwestern University’s medical school found that doctoral students in biomedicine improved their “perceived achievability” of a faculty career after participating in a mentoring program. It’s a result that could provide insight on how to diversify faculties, the researchers say.
About half of the 121 Ph.D. students in the study were placed in small groups, each consisting of other students and a faculty “coach” from a different college. The students, on average, reported that their own perception of the achievability of a faculty career for themselves increased, while the control group saw a decrease.
But the study also reflects the scope of the problem. The researchers, Simon N. Williams, an assistant professor in medical social sciences, and Richard McGee, a medical-education professor, did not reach any conclusions about the effect of the coaching specifically on minority-group members, because too few were recruited for the study. Moreover, despite the intervention, the study showed that the coached students’ “perceived desirability” of a faculty career decreased, although at a lower rate than that of the control group.
“Making an academic career more appealing,” the report concludes, “is a broader and bigger problem than making it seem more possible.”
Some who have long tried to diversify Ph.D. programs and faculties express skepticism that mentors — and new ways that students can connect with them — will have a profound impact.
“What’s the glue that holds it together to make it a true mentor relationship?” asks Ansley Abraham, director of the Southern Regional Education Board’s State Doctoral Scholars Program, which aims to diversify faculties by providing financial and other support to Ph.D. students. “I can be an adviser to anybody. But a mentor implies that there’s something much more personal going on between that student and faculty member. What’s the thing that’s going to foster that very close relationship between two people who met online?”
Despite the concerns, Mr. Abraham signed up as a mentor. “We know what we’ve been doing hasn’t yielded results,” he says. “We have to do new things, and this is another strategy to try.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
