Recruiting Stance Changes
For college recruiters everywhere, those numbers spell dramatic changes in posture. American higher education expanded rapidly as the post-World War II Baby Boom generation grew up, to the amazement of educators in other parts of the world, but now the Baby Boomers are retiring and birth rates among the fami- lies of their more affluent offspring have fallen off. As every Census reviewer knows, Black America’s birth rate continues to confound predictions, and a new element —immigration from Africa and the Caribbean—has begun to swell the black population. On the 1990 Census, 15 percent of Black American population growth came from immigration, and by the year 2000, that had increased to 25 percent.
The Decennial Census is now underway, and every- one will just have to wait to learn whether the black im- migration numbers go up or down, but the implications are clear.
Among Hispanics, immigration from Mexico has been augmented by migrations from the Dominican Republic and other parts of Latin America, but demographers point out that Hispanic women’s rate of producing babies con- tinues to be higher even than African Americans’.
En ingles, Senor, that means colleges and universities that once could focus heavily on recruiting young white males as prime candidates to fill the seats in engineer- ing, computer science and basic science classrooms now find they have room for many more black and Hispanic students. Not only are white Americans’ birth rates down, many of the male candidates who once headed off with a primary personal focus on science and technology studies now are attracted to other fields. So, as Dr. Richardson said, each of the Council of Deans schools now has to do more to keep filling its own classrooms with the young black STEM career aspirants for whom the HBCUs used to be unquestionably the first choice.
HBCUs’ Strength: Nurturing
One clear advantage is the stronger cultural sensi- tivity and better nurturing African American students receive on HBCU campuses. The roadblocks of disparate perception and less-interested support minority degree candidates have reported meeting at traditionally white- majority institutions still pose difficult obstacles for many black students, while graduates of historically black colleges and universities describe a vastly more positive experience.
As the Bayer Facts of Science Education XIV survey of professional chemists and chemical engineers, released this spring, points out, minorities and women arrive at college with the same level of interest in science as white men: Nearly 60 percent of the minority and female STEM professionals interviewed for the study said they became interested in science by age 11. That paralleled a 1998 Bayer study that included white men, the 2010 report said, but 40 percent of the minority professionals also said that they had been discouraged from pursuing STEM careers as some point in their lives.
Former astronaut Mae Jemison, a chemical engineer as well as a medical doctor, said during the announce- ment of the Bayer study, “this and previous Bayer Facts surveys confirm something I’ve long known--that interest
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in science is genderless and colorless. All children have an innate interest in science and the world around them. But for many children, that interest hits a roadblock along an academic system that is still not blind to gender or color.”
More than three-quarters of the study’s respondents said that significant numbers of women and underrepresented minorities are missing from the STEM workforce today because they were not identified, en- couraged or nurtured to pursue STEM studies early on:
• Despite their early interest in science, and despite the importance that the technical pro- fessionals responding to the survey placed on their science teachers and classes, the survey detected bias against girls and minorities in their elementary and high school classrooms.
• For example, while half of those polled say that in elementary (50 percent) and high school, (52 percent), girls were encouraged the same as boys in science classes, [more than a] quarter disagree, saying girls were encouraged less than boys in elementary school (28 percent) and high school (27 percent).
• A full one-third (33 percent) of Caucasian women say girls were encouraged less than boys in both elementary and high school sci- ence classes.
• For minority students, one-third of those polled said these students were encouraged the same as non-minority students in elementary school (33 percent) and high school (34 percent).
• More than one-quarter of African American men (28 percent) and women (26 percent) said that in elementary school minorities were en- couraged less than non-minorities, and roughly one-third of the African American men (31 per- cent) and women (38 percent) said this was the case in high school.
• At the college/graduate school level, the U.S. academic system does a better job training females than minorities for STEM careers.
• For the training job it does with minorities, the higher education system receives an “A” or “B” from [only] one-third (32 percent) and a “D” from one-quarter (23 percent) of those polled. However, less than one in 10 (9 percent) assign it an “A” grade. African American men (50 percent) and women (31 percent) are most likely to give the higher education system a “D” or an “F.”
USBE&IT I Deans Edition SPRING 2010 43
SPECIAL EDITORIAL SECTION
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