By CAITLIN LUKACS
Observer Staff
Nov. 15, 2007

Currently, there are no American Indian professors at any level in the astronomy or civil engineering programs of the top 100 schools for science and engineering, according to an expert on underrepresented minorities. This statistic, she said, demonstrates a wider shortage of women and minorities in university positions, particularly in the areas of science and technology.

Donna Nelson, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, recently released a study at the National Press Club, revealing that women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in the faculties of the country’s leading research universities.

Nelson’s study, which consists of data from all of the National Science Foundation’s top 100 science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments in the United States, effectively demonstrates that while the number of women and underrepresented minorities receiving bachelor’s degrees in those fields has increased over the past five years, the number of doctorate degrees received by the same group has not increased at the same rate. Additionally, the number of faculty positions held by women and minorities has barely increased at all during the same five year period.

The study was funded by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

According to Nelson, she conducted the study because the current science and engineering faculty do not reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. population.

“Together, underrepresented minorities and women constitute almost two-thirds of the U.S. population; as their representations increase in the work force, underutilizing their talent and potential in science and engineering is not only impractical, but also detrimental to the nation’s future success,” according to the report’s introduction.

Both Nelson and the panelists referred to the fields addressed by the study as STEM disciplines.

“The top faculty are important because that’s where our future science and engineering leaders come from,” Nelson said. “I hope very much that these data will focus some attention on the situation facing underrepresented minorities and lead to an increased discussion about this.”

Shirley Malcom, head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, also emphasized the leadership role of the faculty within the fields that were studied.

Professors have the greatest impact on the future of these programs, Malcom said. “Since these individuals in tenured and tenure-track positions will, in fact, be there for a while, they are the ones who are going to shape the workforce of the future. They are the ones who are going to shape the next generations of people at every degree level.”

The University of Connecticut is on the National Science Foundation’s list of the top 50 civil engineering departments in the country. Nicole Ouimet, a senior in the university’s civil engineering program, said she only has two women professors and, including herself, there are only six women in the undergraduate program.

“I’m used to it after focusing on science classes since before college,” she said. “I like being one of the few girls: there’s less competition.”

As far as underrepresented minorities in the civil engineering department, Ouimet said there are four black and seven Hispanic students.

Chart by Donna Nelson

Rochester Institute of Technology’s mechanical engineering program is also on the National Science Foundation’s list of the top 50 science and engineering departments. Tim Dovi, a senior in the program, said he has only met four female professors and one black professor.

“If there are 25 students per classroom, there are probably five girls, maybe less,” Dovi said. “There are fewer African Americans and even fewer Hispanics.”

Union College was not on the National Science Foundation’s list, but it shares many characteristics with the programs that were listed. Matt Carlson, who graduated from Union College last year with a degree in computer science, said there were only two female professors in the entire department and one was hired in his last year there. Additionally, he said, there was only one female student in his program and there were no minority professors or students.

Richard Tapia, a professor of engineering at Rice University, said in order to combat the low numbers of individuals at the highest levels, we need to get children interested in the targeted disciplines at an early age.

“For underrepresented minority students, we have a problem of demand, not supply,” Tapia said. “Youths don’t want careers in STEM.”

Alison Chase, a student teacher in the math department of Waltham High School in Massachusetts, provided a real-life example of this lack of interest. She said there are roughly equal numbers of male and female students in the honors and voluntary upper-level math classes at her school, but there are considerably fewer minorities. Of 41 students voluntarily taking calculus, only two were black and two were Hispanic, she said.

Neither the study nor Nelson herself, suggested any solutions for increasing the low numbers of female and minority students in the fields of science and engineering. However, Irving McPhail of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc., mentioned several programs that the council had implemented to combat this particular problem.

McPhail described the Undergraduate Scholarship Program that granted $1.6 million to nearly 1,300 underrepresented minority students in 2007. He also discussed the council’s “middle school to workforce entry strategy” program, which includes creating high schools that place a large emphasis on science, math, and technology. The program increases high school students’ awareness of career opportunities in engineering and establishes community college scholarships.

“We believe that it is important to start early in terms of interesting underrepresented minority students in STEM careers,” McPhail said. “We think that as a consequence of that we ought to be able to produce larger numbers of students who hopefully will move on into the Ph.D. and into the ranks of the professorial.”