Minority Pipeline: Science's Race Between Education And Catastrophe

Things could be worse. When The Scientist dedicates an issue to "minorities in science," we don't scratch our heads in wonder at the oxymoron, though we might have 30 years ago. There are many minority men and women in the sciences today, but not nearly enough. African, Hispanic, and Native Americans are clearly underrepresented in our laboratories, medical schools, and research centers. Their small numbers in these places of science are a deficit today that threatens to become an unrecoverable loss in a few years. I realize that restating a problem regrettably familiar to us in the sciences raises two questions: How many minorities in the sciences would be "enough," and what is the "loss"? The answers to these questions, as I will explain, are related. We may agree that enough representation of minorities in the sciences is proportional representation. This, in fact, has been the stated goal of public policy for more than a generation. But the policy largely has failed--the representation of minorities in the sciences as a percentage is lower today than 20 years ago--so it is clear that rhetoric by itself is inadequate. We may blame this failure on the misunderstandings about affirmative action that have dogged these policies or on the unlikelihood of expecting a perfectly even distribution of all kinds of people in all professions. Public Policy Insufficient We would do better to admit that public policy by itself can neither provide an adequate definition of "enough" nor tell us where we will find the talented applicants to science programs and the scientists we are looking for. But if we look to education rather than policy, we will find the questions ultimately answering themselves. For example, African Americans are about 11 percent of the population. Given the frequent inadequacy of science teaching in the public schools in black neighborhoods and given the meager science budgets in large numbers of historically black colleges and universities, it should not surprise anyone that only 8 percent of all medical school matriculants are black. Perhaps we should be amazed that 8 percent have acquired these qualifications against long odds. By extending and enriching the science education available to minorities, we inevitably will see the participation of underrepresented minorities in the sciences rise naturally to levels that, I have no doubt, will be nearly equivalent to their proportion of the population. This is neither an argument for diluting standards nor wishful thinking. To the contrary, we already have statistical evidence that minority college graduates who have had the opportunity to earn a science degree apply to medical school in greater proportion than white students with science degrees. We also know that 5.5 percent of black college freshmen declare medicine as their first professional choice, compared with only 3.2 percent of white freshmen. The interest and the talent to provide "enough" minorities in the sciences both are present already. Both will be cultivated and brought to maturity by education if, and only if, first-rate science education is available from the earliest years in school. Without this early start in science, we can expect no improvement. A good education in science must start no later than a good education in English or history. As the stakes get higher--that is, as the study of science grows more complex in college--the teaching of science and the encouragement of minority students must both be reinforced. For example, we know that those larger percentages of black freshmen who intend to go into medicine become smaller percentages upon graduation. There are many reasonable explanations for this falling off in outcomes, including badly taught introductory science courses, discriminatory admissions practices and inhospitable atmospheres on some campuses, and insufficient financial aid. It is also true that young minorities looking at the sciences see so few people who look like them that they are inclined to believe they will have better chances here. Beyond a discouraging lack of role models, there is a dearth of nurturing for minority youngsters in grade and high schools--most notably in integrated schools- -places that have all the potential to foster the talents and support the determination to go into science. This problem is compounded, particularly for young minority males, by high school counseling that--intentionally or not-- directs them away from the intellectually demanding fields and routes them toward sports, the stage, and vocational training, even in the face of good grades and obvious promise. These are social attitudes and problems we must change as citizens. But I am convinced, as are many administrators and instructors at academic medical centers, that the reason for this disparity in outcomes--and that which is most in our power to change as scientists--is poor academic preparation before college. In response to this educational problem, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) launched Proj-ect 3000 by 2000 in 1991, the goal of which is described in shorthand by its name: to increase the number of minorities entering medical school from 1,500 at that time to 3,000 by the year 2000. This goal is ambitious because it aims at reaching proportional representation in a short time, but nonetheless attainable because it relies on the measurable benefits of education rather than the theoretical imperatives of policy. We are well on our way to achieving the project's goal with more than 2,000 underrepresented minorities enrolled in the 1994 matriculating class of medical students. In the short term, the project already is helping to encourage and facilitate accelerated and intensive instruction in the sciences for minority college students and promising high school students who intend to go into the sciences. The project's long-term and most important strategy is the creation, or strengthening, of magnet schools in the health sciences to be run by local school systems, but with the collaboration of nearby academic medical centers. The premise for this strategy is made plain by example. Baylor College of Medicine introduced such a program to the Houston public schools in 1971, and today, three-quarters of the graduates of the High School for the Health Professions have pursued a science or health degree in college. Like Baylor, other medical schools are present in their communities--they are respected, and they know what they will require of their applicants. We could say--and should expect-- the same of physics departments and schools of engineering. While this premise returns institutions of higher learning to their traditional role of imposing the pressure of standards on schools, it does so through the innovations of collaboration and partnership, not through the threat of failure. Such a strategy has made medical schools engaged participants in the process of science education instead of indifferent bystanders by involving them in potential gain rather than in inevitable loss. This returns me to my second question: What is the loss when too few minorities make their lives and livings in science? There is a loss of equity and justice when careers in medicine or biology or chemistry are foreclosed to nearly a quarter of the population. Though we can and perhaps should present the argument in terms of civil rights, it will be more persuasive and, I believe, more successful if we present the argument in terms of need. We all remember the slogan of the United Negro College Fund: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." It does not matter if that mind comes wrapped in a black skin like mine, or a white, red, yellow, or brown skin. It does not matter if that mind was trained at prep school or public school, at Harvard University or Howard University--only that it was well trained and will devote itself to science. Can we afford to waste or, at the very least, risk one mind in four? Or, when the minority population has grown, one mind in three? Most particularly, can the sciences, the most rigorous of our disciplines and the most apparently forbidding to young people, survive--let alone thrive--with an ever smaller pool of recruits? Our young people are our future intellectual capital. We can no more afford the loss of a quarter or a third of them than we can a quarter or a third of our material wealth. The grim truth is that all our future intellectual wealth, not just our scientific capital, is growing smaller in any event: There are more Americans aged 65 and older today than teenagers. We have no power to change the demographic drift of the country. But we do have the power not to shortchange our own future and not to mortgage the future of our children by making sure we cultivate all of our intellectual capital today. In other words, we cannot afford not to invest more into science education for our minority young. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, expressed the same thought--and was honored by seeing himself quoted on thousands of bumper stickers--when he said, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." The cures not found, the treatments not applied, the technologies not developed out of ignorance or out of our failure to educate the next generations of investigators and inventors will come at a high price. H.G. Wells wrote nearly 50 years ago that "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." We do not need to look to the future to discern the catastrophic and exorbitant costs of failing to teach science. Look at the cores of our cities and our smallest country towns. We don't have enough physicians to care for the residents of the black urban neighborhoods, the barrios, the reservations, and the boom towns that went bust, or enough teachers to teach science to the children growing up in these communities. With needs like this before us today, it must be our chief business to find enough teachers to teach and physicians to heal. We must look at minorities in science as an underdeveloped resource and understand that only by integrating their talents into the mainstream of American science will we be assured of the physicians, investigators, and teachers we already need and will need more desperately tomorrow. The realm of ideas and activities we call science is enormous. Within it, there is room for all of us and a need for what we have learned to call diversity. As scientists, it is our job to raise this apparent need to a level of unmistakable understanding. If we fail to do this, we fail our young and our entire society. The robust future of the sciences and the need to open the sciences to all are equal and inseparable. When, therefore, we raise our voices and expectations on behalf of minorities in science, we raise our voices no less on behalf of science itself. By doing so, we fulfill our obligation to them and our society by giving them the means to define their own lives. If we ask again how many minorities do we need, the answer is as many as are willing and able--and as many as we are willing and able to educate in the sciences. That may be the true answer to how many minorities is enough. Any less will continue to be our loss. John W. Diggs is vice president for biomedical research at the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Medical Colleges.

Minority Pipeline: Science's Race Between Education And Catastrophe

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