Students thrive in environments where they feel affirmed, where they feel their efforts are getting them somewhere. A similar dynamic has been observed re women in math and science. A lot of female students are put off from those subjects because they do not feel welcomed in the pedagogical environment. The comments of the recent UCL professor about women being too emotional for science indicate that the problem still exists, at least to some extent. If you are told that you are too dumb to aspire to a certain area, well, you won’t. If you are intimidated by students better prepared or more assertive than you, you will quit. If you are thought to be temperamentally “unsuited” to certain disciplines, you will flee them and go elsewhere.
Inner city kids get the shaft. I get involved through church with mostly minority kids navigating the college process and the kids aren’t prepared for much let alone college.
I think as the Catholic schools have declined in the inner city, the situation has become worse. Once a Catholic school closes, crime goes up in the area. These schools were the saving grace for so many kids.
I agree @ScaredNJDad – inner city kids get the shaft, and I also agree about the Catholic schools. Something hard for me to admit, as a nonbelieving proponent of public schools.
All good comments–as I always say, you can pay in the beginning or you can pay later. Paying later is always a lot more…
As the inner city Catholic schools close, the suburban Catholic schools thrive, with some accepting just 25% of applicants, amazing.
You are exactly correct. Good analysis. I just want to point out that we don’t measure gains solely by MDs achieved, STEM jobs and GPA.
I don’t see it at all as an argument for separate education. Plenty of white kids go to flagship but-not-very-selective state universities and quickly move off the pre-med track.
Instead, it is a compelling argument that college, the way most colleges run, does a very poor job of actually helping students master tough material, especially if they came in with poor preparation. We see huge dropout rates from engineering for similar reasons.
Xavier is an example of what more colleges should aim to do for all of their students, and not an exemplar that is only of merit for African-American or other minority students.
Agree with arabrab. The Xavier model is not to weed out students from pre-med, but to support more kids to be successful and to encourage collaboration, not competition. That may not work in every school, but certainly says a lot about how some kids that have a poor HS background can, with appropriate support, do well in college and go on to Med School or other graduate degrees. It may not work everywhere, but maybe the idea that the appropriate way to train scientists and engineers is to design classes to weed out 1/3 of the students by the end of freshman year is not the best model.
Given that the third school on the list that produces the most black doctors is Harvard, not clear that Gladwell’s hypothesis is necessarily proven.
African (as an ethnic group) students from a new immigrant family tend to do much better academically. It could be because, when they grew up, they were “shielded” from the social ill of American inner city education system. Their parents tend to have a better job too. When their parents were back in their native country (before the family immigrated to the US), they were likely among the top tier or even the elite class in that society (These parents are not much different from some recent Asian parents, except that there are fewer of them in terms of the absolute number.)
According to http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr12-16.pdf (figure 6), immigrants from Africa tend to have high educational attainment (41.5% with bachelor’s degrees), but there is variation by country of origin (e.g. Nigeria 60.9%, South Africa 57.3%, Kenya 47.2%, Ghana 34.9%, Ethiopia 26.2%, Somalia 12.5%).
https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acs-19.pdf (figure 13) lists educational attainment in 2010 of non-immigrants, immigrants, and various origin regions of immigrants (age 25 and older). The percentage with bachelor’s degrees:
28.2% overall
28.4% native born
27.0% foreign born
40.3% from Africa
48.5% from Asia
36.4% from Europe
42.5% from Northern America (presumably mainly Canada)
5.3% from Mexico
9.0% from Central America
27.8% from South America
18.5% from Caribbean
This NYT article about UT low-income admitted students is relevant to this discussion:
Who Gets to Graduate?
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?referer=&_r=0
That’s a key issue: not knowing how to ask for help.
On a another thread, there’s an int’l student on full FA who is struggling w not enough money, but is too humble and too unknowledgeable about how to ask for help.
The first incorrect and frankly insulting assumption here, implied in the second paragraph, is that affirmative action programs serve to get underqualified black students admitted to universities in which they are at the “bottom of the pack.” That’s not the purpose of affirmative action: the purpose is to get underrepresented minorities (including blacks and Hispanics) admitted to universities at which they are qualified, but have been subtly barred from entry for complicated racial and historical reasons. Studies show that once these students get to top schools, they do as well as their peers academically and graduate at the same rates.
Secondly, Heriot proposes that the “single most important” reason that black students have better success at entering STEM fields from HBCUs is because half the black students have entering credentials at the top of the class, but I think that’s silly. I went to an HBCU. I love my HBCU. But let’s be frank - the top-ranked students at your average HBCU are probably equiavalent to your middle-of-the-pack, or even lower-ranked students, at your average Ivy or other top school. Even if we assume that test scores are an accurate measure of qualification for Ivy educations, an SAT score of 200 points below the median at an Ivy may still be around a 2000, which still puts a student in the 93rd percentile of test-takers nationwide. Even a - shock and horror - 1900 is 88th percentile. Why would we have reason to believe that a student who is scoring better than 88-93% of her peers - and has an otherwise outstanding application package, often without the benefit of social structures other applicants have - won’t be able to do well at a top school? There’s no evidence that there are any huge performance differences between a student in the 93rd percentile and a student in the 98th.
By comparison, the average SAT scores at my top HBCU (Spelman College) are in the mid 400 to mid 500 range. I literally had the highest SAT score the year I was admitted (2003-2004), but my scores would’ve been average to maybe slightly above-average at Yale or Harvard then (and definitely just average now). And anyway, it’s a moot point because I graduated in the middle of my class in college.
But, as a black woman who actually went to an HBCU and actually does have a PhD (in a social science field - the NSF defines it as a science field; most of you probably would not), I don’t think it’s being in a place where I felt like I was in the top (because - as I pointed out - I wasn’t). Instead, it was because I was in an environment that explicitly and implicitly showed and encouraged me that I could be anything I wanted to be, even a scientist. When I arrived at college as a first-generation college student (like most of my classmates) and a working-class student (again, like most of my classmates), my conception of a scientist and a professor was a white man in a lab coat. I assumed all of my professors would be white men in white lab coats or tweed jackets.
Imagine what it felt like for me when my philosophy professor was a black Brazilian man; my French professor was a black Algerian woman; my sociology professor was a black American woman; my first-year required course professor was an Afro-Caribbean woman…even my PE professor was a black man. The president of my college was a black woman with short natural hair in a time before natural hair was ubiquitous. I cannot put words to how tremendous that was for me at age 18.
I trace my own ideas about wanting to get a PhD and feeling like it was possible for someone who looks like me to those first classes, particularly that sociology professor. I had professors of all races who explicitly talked about race in science and academia without getting uncomfortable about it. In fact, it was a part of our first-year required curriculum (that class was called African Diaspora and the World, and it’s a mainstay of Spelman’s curriculum).
In the course of my four years at an HBCU the idea of a black person being a professional became normal. No, not just normal - expected. It was expected of me that I would become an upper-middle-class professional because why not? My peers were doing research and applying for graduate programs and prestigious jobs. Top firms and schools came recruiting. I had alumnae friends who went onto grad school and med school and entered all kinds of fields in which we are underrepresented. (Note from the list that @Gator88NE provided that Spelman produces a whopping 1% of black applicants to medical schools nationwide, a ridiculous feat for a college with 2300 students.) And because of my experience at an HBCU, I have a large network of African American friends in professional positions - I know a LOT of black lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, statisticians, teachers, entrepreneurs, managers, etc. In fact, I sometimes get confused when i hear people say how underrepresented we are because I feel like I know so many. The flip of that is that it’s normal no-big-deal for me to think of people of minority ethnic groups as intelligent high-achievers. Because I know so many, in large part because I went to an HBCU.
Ironically, I feel like it endowed me with the confidence to be “the only one/one of few” later on in life, in graduate school and at work (where I’m the only black person on my team, and the only visible racial minority.) I didn’t drop out of graduate school even in face of having few role models who looked like me because I already had those role models - I already knew of black professors so I knew it was possible for me, too. And I had a network of minority peers who were also in graduate school at the same time living the same struggle. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot of very important and valuable things from attending a predominantly white institution for graduate school, and honestly, I strongly encourage students to go to culturally and racially diverse universities these days unless they really want the experience of an HBCU.
But I think these kinds of things are far more important than being top of your class.
And I think that speaks to what someone said earlier about not necessarily making segregated colleges (lol) but having predominantly white institutions learn important lessons from schools like Howard, Spelman, Xavier, Puerto Rico et al. There’s a book called [i[The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace* about a young poor black man from Newark who went to Yale and shows the flip side. Yeah, sure he made it there! But Robert often feels alienated and uncomfortable at Yale because he feels like no one understands his experiences; there are few people to talk to about the transition from all-black Newark to mostly-white Yale. He feels lost and isolated, and comments frequently on how people always celebrate the fact that he made it but do little to support him once he actually did get there. That contributes a lot to the “short and tragic” part of his life. Of course, not all minority students feel isolated and alone at predominantly white colleges; many thrive! But…if enough do…that could contribute to problems of attrition from STEM fields/careers.
Thank you, Julliet! My D is applying primarily to HBCU’s for exactly the reasons you outline. While she is not first gen, she has had the great experience of being at a high school very much like the HBCU’s-one that encourages and nurtures kids of color. She would like to continue that experience in college. We’ve met successful STEM as well as humanities professionals-MD’s Ph.D’s and more with an HBCU degree. We know she can be successful despite the disdain some have for these schools.
Yet when Asians do the same there’s an uproar about robot kids.
Perhaps then we should also stop complaining about income inequality by race?
Hence Asian Americans believe that such kids shouldn’t get the benefits of Affirmative Action.
1 and #2 are HBCUs. Coincidence? I doubt it.
I agree with this 100%.
May be my perspective is influenced by my background as an engineer turned scientist, but I think this is the right model. This continues to the PhD phase. STEM is a ruthless field. There is only one right answer to each problem asked. What works in arts disciplines will not work in science, IMHO.
So then how do we solve the racial/economic gap in STEM? The simple answer is to make public schools better instead of asking STEM as a discipline to change. Perhaps community colleges can play a role, and the remedial education happens there (but the kids start in freshmen year again post STEM remedial education). But to ask a top-notch STEM program like MIT or Caltech to switch from tough, tough exams to nurturing ones will fail the top performing kids.
I would prefer to have the top performing kids succeed in STEM. That’s the last bastion of meritocracy in American education. Let’s leave that unchanged.
There is a terrific organization called the Posse Foundation (https://www.possefoundation.org/) which sends kids to selective colleges in “posses” so that they have peers to support them, and have previous years posses to look up to and see how they succeed. I think this is a great program and seems to help students be more self-assured so that they don’t lose their confidence when challenged.