Six years ago Dr. Onyeka Ezenwoye received his doctorate in computer science from Florida International University in Miami. He was the first Black person to enroll in the program and the first to complete it.
Two other Blacks enrolled before he graduated—and that was it.
Though minorities have made advancements in academia, like assuming presidencies of prestigious universities or chancellorships of large college systems, STEM is still an area where minorities are lacking. At most STEM programs at the colleges and universities nationwide, diversity, not just among students, but among the faculty, is the exception, not the norm.
According to data from the National Science Foundation, the percentage of underrepresented minority faculty has remained flat over the last 20 years, hovering at just a little over 5 percent. In contrast, the percentage of women in STEM faculty positions has soared to about 25 percent.
Many attribute the low numbers of minority STEM faculty to a variety of factors, including a weak pipeline at the K-12 level in predominantly minority, public school systems that fail to prepare most young people for the rigors of mathematics and science; a dearth of jobs in academia coupled with an inflexible system for hiring faculty; and the availability of attractive options in industry and national labs for STEM doctorate degree holders.
“We know that among all recipients of Ph.D.s in science and engineering, regardless of race and ethnicity, fewer than half will end up in academia,” says Dr. Keivan Stassun, a professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University, adjunct professor of physics and co-director of the Bridge Program—a partnership between Fisk and Vanderbilt that aims to boost the number of underrepresented minorities earning doctorates in the STEM fields.
“There are only so many academic positions, and there are multiple ways for individuals to be engaged in and contribute to the STEM workforce,” Stassun adds. “We very much need to increase representation of minorities in national labs. We very much need to increase representation of minorities in [research and development] in industry. They all represent successful outcomes for engaging the domestic talent pool in the STEM work force.”
Ezenwoye, now an assistant professor of computer science at the Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Ga., says he chose to go into academia after graduation because he believed it gave him the option to teach and do research.
“I thought academia was a better option because it gave me the sort of flexibility I needed,” he says, adding that one of his job offers was from a national lab in Oregon. “I thought the progress I would make professionally was better in academia. In academia you can go all the way [to full professor]. In your later years, you can go into administration, whereas at a national lab you’re pretty much doing research the whole time.”
But many minorities with newly minted STEM Ph.D.s don’t have options, particularly in the academy.
Dr. Richard Tapia, a mathematician and Maxfield-Oshman professor in engineering at Rice University, says the low number of minority STEM faculty is due, in part, to a hiring process that sometimes overlooks candidates who are not graduates of elite programs, as well as a hiring system that vests much of the decision making in a faculty selection committee with rigid rules.
Tapia—a child of Mexican immigrants who has served on Rice’s faculty for 40 years and in 2011 received the National Medal of Science from the White House—has long been a champion of diversity in U.S. education. He says universities need to expand their criteria for recruiting and hiring faculty members.
