barbos
Contributor
How is that a good excuse?
PhDs are free, in fact, normally you are being paid to do it.
Yes, payoff is bad, but that does not prevent whites from going for it.
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Black Man in the Lab!
- Thread starter Nice Squirrel
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How is that a good excuse?
PhDs are free, in fact, normally you are being paid to do it.
Yes, payoff is bad, but that does not prevent whites from going for it.
Which says nothing about those who change out of STEM degree programs.
First, "excuse" is a bizarre word to use here. The vast majority of people are under no obligation to even attempt to get a PhD, so there's no need for an excuse when they don't bother.
Second, you can't just enter a PhD program right out of high school, you know - and even engineering undergrads have to pay for the privilege of attending school, unless they're extremely lucky (which I was). A family who can barely afford to get a kid through high school, stands nearly no chance of supporting the same kid through that program alone - especially as the parents grow older, and increasingly unhealthy.
Third, the point is, if they *do* get a BS degree, then it's often a smart idea to stop there, and get a job that will likely pay for their MS degree, as well as giving them a good salary - and they can move along from there if they so desire.
And fourth, no, PhDs are not "free". You act like it's a "free" coffee mug or shirt.
This apparently has a noticeable effect on the representation of minorities in STEM.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
Derec
Contributor
In a manner of speaking. There is tuition, but PhD students work in research or teaching for their adviser and get that paid plus a stipend.
barbos
Contributor
How so? This thread is about absence of black men in the lab. What's their excuse?
Well, I have seen/met black undergrads, I have never met black PhD students in US.
I know they exist, I just never met one.
Are you calling white folk dumb?
Well, they are free in the sense that you don't have to pay money for it. You need to earn it though.
Toni
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Those stipends are not as easy to come by as they used to be, for one thing. The other thing is that many, if not most middle class students and lower have substantial student debt. That debt does discourage students from considering grad school, if the young adults I know (mostly white, with strong academic skills)
In most fields of biology one needs a PhD plus at least one post doc., preferably more than one. That's a lot of delay/forgone income for not lots of future compensation.
Toni
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I do not know if it is still the case, but in my undergrad days, my black friends complained mightily about the hard steering they received to go into non-science fields such as sociology. This included the black woman who was hands down the top student in my honors calculus class.
Derec
Contributor
Do you have any sources for availability of stipends for PhD students over time?
Subsidized Stafford loans do not accrue interest while one is in school. Unsubsidized Staffords do but you still don't have to start repaying them while in school.
Postdocs are also paid.
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"Hard steering" by whom? And how long ago were your undergrad days?
I can't imagine anyone would steer a person with math aptitude toward non-math fields.
Toni
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It's not a one to one correspondence. Certain gene may be required but does not guarantee you will be a criminal or a scientist
Meh: our parents did not attend college but all of my siblings and I ended up in STEM fields. There was heavy recruiting of those of us who showed math/science talent and considerable parental pressure to do seething that would earn us good money. STEM wasn't called that but it was seen as the way to go and the only rational choice for 'smart' students.
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Truth, every last word.
barbos
Contributor
They are automatic in PhD programs.
Nobody in his right mind would accept an offer without TA or RA and a stipend.
Well,I will admit I don't know much about undergrad debt situation for white/blacks.
Again, how is that a good excuse for blacks not going to grad school?
A study done by an engineering journal in the 90s pointed to the fact that blacks were generally not selecting engineering in school.
As to engineering being white, without Asian immigrant engineers technology would have not have grown. In t 90s there was a drop in American engineering enrollments.
The 60s Moynihan study on poverty was controversial It concluded that in both blacks and whites primary education performance correlated to family stability and economics, not race. It also concluded that welfare was destroying the back family.
Blacks who immigrate do not have the cultural baggage and damage of blacks coming from slavery and Jim Crow. Colin Powell is a good example. Jamaican immigrant parents.
When I started as an engineer in 1980 it was racist and misogynist. Racial and female jokes and slurs were common.
Today it is a different environment. People who play the race card today only serve to hold back blacks. The belief the deck is stacked against them.
Engineers from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, and Asia are common as are women.
You would need to look at the college choices by race ad the overall math preparstion.
I watched a show on a NYC charter school. Uniforms required, discipline and respect for teachers reinforced, and parental involvement required. Black kids perform well.
lt is like the RCC schools I went to. With my dysfunctional family situation without the RCC school discipline that kept e from gong too far astray I might not have graduated high school. Single parent father family who left me and my sisters alone for days. One sister did not graduate high school , she went to a public school.
As to engineering being white, without Asian immigrant engineers technology would have not have grown. In t 90s there was a drop in American engineering enrollments.
The 60s Moynihan study on poverty was controversial It concluded that in both blacks and whites primary education performance correlated to family stability and economics, not race. It also concluded that welfare was destroying the back family.
Blacks who immigrate do not have the cultural baggage and damage of blacks coming from slavery and Jim Crow. Colin Powell is a good example. Jamaican immigrant parents.
When I started as an engineer in 1980 it was racist and misogynist. Racial and female jokes and slurs were common.
Today it is a different environment. People who play the race card today only serve to hold back blacks. The belief the deck is stacked against them.
Engineers from Russia, Eastern Europe, India, and Asia are common as are women.
You would need to look at the college choices by race ad the overall math preparstion.
I watched a show on a NYC charter school. Uniforms required, discipline and respect for teachers reinforced, and parental involvement required. Black kids perform well.
lt is like the RCC schools I went to. With my dysfunctional family situation without the RCC school discipline that kept e from gong too far astray I might not have graduated high school. Single parent father family who left me and my sisters alone for days. One sister did not graduate high school , she went to a public school.
Toni
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No, assistantships are NOT automatic in grad school. Depends on school and program, etc.
More blacks compared with whites come from lower socioeconomic status and are less likely to have any support from family and are more likely to need to start earning earlier.
So what's your excuse for using the term excuse vs reason? Your mindset may be showing..,
Again, you use the wrong word.
It's actually not hard to work in "the lab" with a BS degree - or even just as an undergrad working towards one. For that matter, technicians don't even have that much. The actual story is specifically about black men earning PhDs in STEM, in particular. To address that, you need to address every roadblock, from birth, through the end of their academic career. And, in my experience, when you look towards PhDs in particular, money becomes important - and the less wealth a person's family has, the more important it becomes. You can claim stipends and the like as much as you want - but unless they rival what one can make by simply leaving college and working (and STEM degrees can earn a lot of money in private industry), they're going to leave.
And in fact, I'll guarantee you that most STEM graduates went into the field not only because it's interesting, but also because it offers high salaries with just a Bachelors degree. You're looking for an "excuse" - I refuse to offer you one. I'm giving reasons.
doubtingt
Senior Member
Clearly the list of questions in the OP are all nested questions/issues. Once you account for performance in grade school (and on tests like ACT that measure what you learned in grade school), then this accounts for much of the other under-representation at the higher levels which each require strong performance at the lower levels. SES and parents educational attainment accounts for much of the remaining difference.
Affirmative Action plays a role in the differences at the lower levels of STEM education persisting upward through each level from college onward.
Without AA, blacks would be admitted by the same success predicting academic criteria that whites are. This would notably reduce the racial gaps in rates of graduation, STEM major, grad school, etc.. But having AA means that blacks are disproportionately represented among those at the low end of the variables that predict success. The whole point of AA is to admit students of color that would otherwise be rejected because their credentials predict low college grades and high drop out rates. This not only has the direct impact on the likely success of those admitted under these policies, but it has an indirect social impact on other black students who did have the credentials and did not need AA polices to be admitted. These other students see many of their fellow black students struggle and fail out and this reduces their own confidence. Any student can stumble and struggle at times, but if you have self-doubts then those temporary obstacles are more likely to be interpreted as evidence of inability and you'll quit on that goal.
AA has similar impact at the faculty level. Such policies mean that black applicants are over represented among the faculty with borderline credentials that objectively predict future success on the job. They are more likely to be hired even when their teaching, mentoring, and/or research skills are questionable. As a result, their students suffer both indirectly by having lower quality teachers and research mentors and indirectly by having negative role models who wind up not succeeding in the profession. In a former department of mine, 3 separate times a faculty member was hired despite not being close to the top 10% of the applicant pool on any criteria of teaching or research competence. Because short list applicants give presentations to the whole department, the graduate students all could see that these black applicants that were given the job were clearly not in the same league as the other presenters that were not given the job (or even in the league of many of the grad students themselves). This particularly upset the minority grad students who via their minority grad student organization voted against these black applicants and expressed concern that it was so obviously an instance of getting hired for being black that it was insulting to them. Unsurprisingly, all 3 of these faculty struggled mightily and, despite being given way more assistance and chances to succeed than typical new faculty, they all failed to get tenure, and this was at an institution with very easy standards for tenure. Was the positive impact of having these black examples of STEM faculty greater than the negative impacts of knowing they got hired for their race and then watching them fail because of their lack of qualifications?
The same thing happens with grad students. Some in our department noticed that the drop out rate among black grad students was twice as high as whites, so without thinking they declared it the fault of institutional racism that puts obstacles in their way. However, most of the dropouts had black faculty advisors, and they comprised the majority of students admitted despite having verbal and quantitative GRE scores below 500. Not a single white student was admitted with those low of scores and once you excluded the dropouts that had such low scores, there was no difference in the dropout rates among blacks and whites. IOW, the only racism the data showed evidence of was the racism inherent in the AA policies that essentially guaranteed higher failure rates among black students once admitted without minimal qualifications.
Ironically, defenders of AA policies, such as one of the people quoted in the article recognize that AA programs haven't worked much to increase STEM scientists.
Sadly, they automatically assume that this is because the policies are not extreme enough, rather than considering the obvious statistical fact that such policies only ensure that differences in success at lower levels persist as differences in rates of success at higher levels, which in turn sends negative social signals to blacks that if they try they are less likely to succeed. Actually, it is worse than not considering the relevant data and stats, many of these activists explicitly reject data and stats because they don't give the ideologically correct explanation, as seen in the OP article...
So, some of the leading voices among those speaking about the problem of black representation in STEM are sending an anti-intellectual anti-science approach to explaining the problem. That is part of the problem.
The article does present some very useful and not often talked about data.
Note bolded part. Many blacks that succeed in getting a STEM Ph.D. don't stay as a practitioner in the field because they go get a government job, which usually has far more pay and benefits. First, that is not a "problem" for those going into government. Second, its rather obvious that blacks being more likely to leave STEM for government is partly due to them having more opportunity to get a government job due to strong civil service AA policies and the creation of government outreach programs that almost exclusively hire minority professionals for obvious and legit reasons. Another factor is that black professions are more likely to be motivated to be a social activist to help their black community become more involved in the career they themselves value. White scientists are much less likely than black scientists to think "Hey, rather than this theoretical science, I should use my talents to increase the number of people in my racial group pursuing science careers."
The article also mentions that blacks are "risk averse" and don't want to risk the debt that getting a Ph.D. entails. It would nice to see if there is any evidence of this beyond the more general impact of SES and parental income and its impact upon the need to and willingness to accrue large debt for a degree.
Affirmative Action plays a role in the differences at the lower levels of STEM education persisting upward through each level from college onward.
Without AA, blacks would be admitted by the same success predicting academic criteria that whites are. This would notably reduce the racial gaps in rates of graduation, STEM major, grad school, etc.. But having AA means that blacks are disproportionately represented among those at the low end of the variables that predict success. The whole point of AA is to admit students of color that would otherwise be rejected because their credentials predict low college grades and high drop out rates. This not only has the direct impact on the likely success of those admitted under these policies, but it has an indirect social impact on other black students who did have the credentials and did not need AA polices to be admitted. These other students see many of their fellow black students struggle and fail out and this reduces their own confidence. Any student can stumble and struggle at times, but if you have self-doubts then those temporary obstacles are more likely to be interpreted as evidence of inability and you'll quit on that goal.
AA has similar impact at the faculty level. Such policies mean that black applicants are over represented among the faculty with borderline credentials that objectively predict future success on the job. They are more likely to be hired even when their teaching, mentoring, and/or research skills are questionable. As a result, their students suffer both indirectly by having lower quality teachers and research mentors and indirectly by having negative role models who wind up not succeeding in the profession. In a former department of mine, 3 separate times a faculty member was hired despite not being close to the top 10% of the applicant pool on any criteria of teaching or research competence. Because short list applicants give presentations to the whole department, the graduate students all could see that these black applicants that were given the job were clearly not in the same league as the other presenters that were not given the job (or even in the league of many of the grad students themselves). This particularly upset the minority grad students who via their minority grad student organization voted against these black applicants and expressed concern that it was so obviously an instance of getting hired for being black that it was insulting to them. Unsurprisingly, all 3 of these faculty struggled mightily and, despite being given way more assistance and chances to succeed than typical new faculty, they all failed to get tenure, and this was at an institution with very easy standards for tenure. Was the positive impact of having these black examples of STEM faculty greater than the negative impacts of knowing they got hired for their race and then watching them fail because of their lack of qualifications?
The same thing happens with grad students. Some in our department noticed that the drop out rate among black grad students was twice as high as whites, so without thinking they declared it the fault of institutional racism that puts obstacles in their way. However, most of the dropouts had black faculty advisors, and they comprised the majority of students admitted despite having verbal and quantitative GRE scores below 500. Not a single white student was admitted with those low of scores and once you excluded the dropouts that had such low scores, there was no difference in the dropout rates among blacks and whites. IOW, the only racism the data showed evidence of was the racism inherent in the AA policies that essentially guaranteed higher failure rates among black students once admitted without minimal qualifications.
Ironically, defenders of AA policies, such as one of the people quoted in the article recognize that AA programs haven't worked much to increase STEM scientists.
from the article said:
Sadly, they automatically assume that this is because the policies are not extreme enough, rather than considering the obvious statistical fact that such policies only ensure that differences in success at lower levels persist as differences in rates of success at higher levels, which in turn sends negative social signals to blacks that if they try they are less likely to succeed. Actually, it is worse than not considering the relevant data and stats, many of these activists explicitly reject data and stats because they don't give the ideologically correct explanation, as seen in the OP article...
from the article said:
So, some of the leading voices among those speaking about the problem of black representation in STEM are sending an anti-intellectual anti-science approach to explaining the problem. That is part of the problem.
The article does present some very useful and not often talked about data.
Note bolded part. Many blacks that succeed in getting a STEM Ph.D. don't stay as a practitioner in the field because they go get a government job, which usually has far more pay and benefits. First, that is not a "problem" for those going into government. Second, its rather obvious that blacks being more likely to leave STEM for government is partly due to them having more opportunity to get a government job due to strong civil service AA policies and the creation of government outreach programs that almost exclusively hire minority professionals for obvious and legit reasons. Another factor is that black professions are more likely to be motivated to be a social activist to help their black community become more involved in the career they themselves value. White scientists are much less likely than black scientists to think "Hey, rather than this theoretical science, I should use my talents to increase the number of people in my racial group pursuing science careers."
The article also mentions that blacks are "risk averse" and don't want to risk the debt that getting a Ph.D. entails. It would nice to see if there is any evidence of this beyond the more general impact of SES and parental income and its impact upon the need to and willingness to accrue large debt for a degree.
NobleSavage
Veteran Member
Yes, the same reason one 9% of nurses are male. Being a nurse is a good job, but I never even thought about it.
Agreed. Once you apply the proper controls race almost always drops out of the picture.
This I find more questionable. Rather than destroying families I think it made the life of single parenthood easier so more people chose that route.
Yup--because it's cultural baggage, not discrimination.
Yup--get the parents involved and kids of any color do well. If the parents don't care it doesn't matter what color their skin is.
The cultural bagage comes from slavery and Jim Crow. Post Civil War blacks began educating themselves and moving into society. Jim Crow was the white reaction.