National labs scramble to produce more U.S.-born scientist of color
Most people associate the Los Alamos National Laboratories [LANL]
as the place where the first atomic bomb was built. Officials at LANL,
however, assert that their new mission is more in the realm of
environmental cleanup, rather than nuclear destruction.
During the summer, LANL, like other national laboratories around
the country, engages in another mission — expanding the number of
U.S.-born minorities in science and technology fields.
Many experts perceive the scarcity of U.S.-born students of color
in the scientific pipeline as a national crisis. Although they cite
efforts by government and industry to educate students of color, they
say that these efforts are not producing anything near the numbers that
are needed to bring about equity any time soon.
And the abundance of foreign scholars entering the pipeline only
adds to the problem. Today, according to Michael Chapman, the immediate
past-president of the National Association of Scientists and Engineers,
50 percent of the Ph.D. students in this country are foreign-born.
“This is ,going to kill the country. It’s simply bringing in cheap
labor. This practice is good in the short run, but in the long term,
it’s a disaster. We have to educate and train our own. We have to be
masters of our fate,” Chapman says.
And that problem is particularly acute where U.S.-born minorities
are concerned. Monica Palacios, associate director of the Center for
the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education, says
that one of the primary problems is that American society is not
investing in its youth.
