The Ivory Tower
I was recently talking to a faculty member in my department who is working on recruiting underrepresented minority students to apply to graduate school. She mentioned that the NIH was really riding graduate schools (such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford) hard to increase their ethnic diversity, since right now they’re mostly composed of whites and Asians.
At least in our department, the balance between men and women is pretty even, but the ethnic diversity is essentially nil. There are whites, Asians, and Asian-Americans. A few Southeast Asians round out the total. Almost no African-Americans (or Africans) that I’ve seen (maybe a post-doc somewhere?), maybe a few of Hispanic descent. No native Americans that I can recognize (though I often find it difficult to tell).
The Ivory Tower really is a sea of ivory faces.
But that’s apparently the way it is in all biology departments across the nation. The professor told me that across the nation, there were only 500 African-American applicants to graduate schools in biology programs. 500 in the entire nation. Looking at the ETS numbers, nearly 40,000 students taking the GREs in a year said they wanted to enroll in biology or biomedical research graduate school. Let’s say only 25,000 students actually applied to graduate school, to be conservative (that’s less than two thirds). African-Americans would make up only 2% of the student pool (and these are just applicants). There’s something definitely amiss with this situation.
That’s not something that can be fixed by the faculty at one university department or another. The government needs to do something, because this is a collective action problem. The NIH shouldn’t just pressure the graduate schools; they should throw money at the situation, if they really feel there’s a problem (and I think there is). Establish scholarships. I mean, with $10 million, they could establish 100 fellowships that fund at the level of the NSF or DOD fellowships, giving 3 years of a $30,000 stipend. Maybe they could even cut back the war spending 0.01% and use that money to provide 500 fellowships. The situation will be difficult to change for any one university; just putting the pressure on them will make them squabble over the 500 prospective students that are out there.
