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Wanted: A Better Way to Boost Numbers of Minority Ph.D.s An Interview with Dr. Isiah M Warner Shirley Vining Brown "Citizen Scientist" About Our Icon Managing Editor: Yolanda
S. George Editor:
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Wanted: A Better Way to Boost Numbers
of Minority Ph.D.s, p.3
Looking for results Because trying to change the culture of an institution can be a long, slow process, some funding organizations focus on departments and individuals with a good track record. "We've decided to concentrate on helping the people who have shown that they can make it happen," says Ted Greenwood, who runs the Sloan Foundation's effort to increase the number of minorities receiving Ph.D.s in science and engineering. Sloan's program, begun in 1994, tries to boost Ph.D. output by giving faculty members and departments $30,000 to support each additional minority student. It also keeps score, trimming the grants of those who fall short by failing to recruit or retain the expected number of students. Although the program has yet to graduate its first Ph.D., Greenwood hopes that his annual budget of $3 million, including a grant to Purdue's biology, chemistry, and engineering departments, will eventually add 100 minority doctorates a year to the existing academic pool. NSF's revamped graduate fellowship program is looking for racially neutral ways to serve minorities without reserving a certain number of spots for them. At the urging of the Justice Department, which wanted to avoid a politically charged trial and a possible precedent-setting defeat, NSF officials settled the case for $95,400-paying $14,400 to the student, Travis Kidd, and $81,000 to his lawyers.  The new selection criteria for next year's class of fellows are expected to downplay the importance of scores on standardized tests, in particular the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). One approach would set a threshold score above which every applicant is deemed acceptable and then use other factors that many people believe are equally relevant to success in science, including creativity, determination, and real-life experience, to choose the winners. Tapia, who advocates such a threshold as a way to increase diversity without using set-asides, says such an approach would be a marked improvement over current practices. "The misuse of standardized tests has been the worst enemy of minorities," he says. Rice's freshman class contains a significant number of underrepresented minorities with "substantially lower SAT scores than the university at large," he says, who were chosen on the basis of other, race-neutral criteria. "But once admitted," Tapia says, "they are on a par in terms of retention rates and grade point average." Applying the same policy to graduate admissions, he says, has allowed his colleagues to assemble a computer and applied mathematics department of some three dozen students that is one-third minority and more than half women. "And we graduate at those rates," he says proudly. Tapia currently receives funding from the Sloan program and is hoping to win NSF funding to replicate that success at a consortium of universities. But administrators of other programs aimed at minorities worry that, whatever guidelines are used, the results may not make up for the loss of the minority fellowships. "[The settlement] could have a devastating effect," warns NIH's Ruffin. "These things are very competitive, and the people who make the decisions bring to the table their own sense of what makes someone most qualified. They may not be biased, but they may not know all the factors involving minority students." Indeed, choosing the appropriate factors is so problematic that most
federal agencies, including NIH, sidestep the issue by making grants to
institutions, which are then free to use their own selection criteria.
Through bridge and partnership programs with colleges and universities
that have large numbers of minority students, majority universities also
can tap a much larger pool of minority students than exists on their own
campus.
Granting sources like Hughes are also treading warily. The philanthropy is still a defendant in a suit brought by a white high school student denied entry to a summer science camp for minorities run by Texas A&M Univer-sity, which U.S. officials agreed to settle last December (Science, 2 January, p. 22), and top officials declined to be interviewed on the subject. "There is a changing legal climate that raises questions we have to address," says Hughes spokesman David Jarmul. "But we think our commitment to supporting programs that increase participation by minorities and women is compatible with the law and consistent with our goal of training biomedical researchers." NYU's Oppenheim also wants to do good science in an atmosphere that fosters diversity. And that requires a major commitment from "majority" institutions such as his. In 1990, he began a summer research program to attract minorities to NYU's graduate schools. It was through the program, which is now "color-blind" and currently 75% majority, that he befriended Savoy Brummer, an African-American graduate of Howard University. Now a second-year medical student in the honors (research-oriented) program at the medical school, Brummer has spent the past three summers at NYU doing research. He says that Oppen-heim, who is white, has been an immeasurable help as he takes his first steps into a career in medical research and that trust, not a desire to remove racial barriers, is the key to their close relationship. "I decided to come to NYU because Joel promised to stay here until I'm done," he says. "In a way, I've put my life in his hands. And he's always there for me." This is an updated version of the story that appeared
in the print version of Science. Details of the new awards are available
at NSF.
Reprinted with permission from Science, Volume 281, Number 5381 Issue of 28 Aug 1998, pp. 1268 - 1270 ©1998 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science. Related Articles in Science:
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