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Understanding the Current Status of Black Professionals in Academia and Industry

Randall C. Morgan Jr., M.D., M.B.A., Cobb/NMA Health Institute, moderated the first session to provide context for the discussions over the next 2 days. Norma Poll-Hunter, Ph.D., Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), shared data on medical school faculty and leadership to challenge the group to consider how to increase representation. Karl W.

Reid, Ed.D., National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), shared insights from NSBE and research about the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline and strategies to support high-achieving African American students.

BLACK FACULTY AND LEADERS AT VARIOUS STAGES OF TRANSITION

Dr. Poll-Hunter provided a statistical view of Black representation in U.S. medical schools, drawing primarily on AAMC data. Blacks/African Americans represented 6.2 percent of medical school graduates in 2018–2019. They were 5.1 percent of residents, 5.0 percent of active U.S. physicians, and 3.6 percent of full-time medical school (M.D.) faculty. Looking more closely at 2019 faculty data, there were 6,503 Black/African American faculty members out of 179,238 faculty members in total. (An additional 511 individuals reported mixed Black and other race/ethnicity.) By rank, the breakdown was as follows:

• Full professor: 755
• Associate professor: 1,202
• Assistant professor: 3,748
• Instructor: 664
• Other: 134

By sex, Black women were 2.1 percent of all full-time faculty; Black men were 1.5 percent of full-time faculty. Looked at another way, women were 58.5 percent of the total among full-time Black faculty. Rank-wise, Black women were 5.8 percent of assistant, 4.5 percent of associate, and 2.8 percent of full professors. Black men were 3.3 percent of assistant, 2.46 percent of associate, and 1.6 percent of full professors. “When we look across faculty ranks for all underrepresented minorities, the representation decreases going up faculty rank,” she commented. “There is a lot of work to be done here.”

Looking at faculty by both gender and race and ethnicity, the percentage has been stagnant from 2010 to 2019, despite the growth of medical school faculties overall. “The work that you are doing here today is going to be really critical in changing the course and trajectory from this point forward,” she said to workshop participants. She called attention to AAMC data (Liu and Morrison, 2014) on retention and attrition statistics for new

assistant professors entering faculties in institutions in 2000. Although the data are older, Dr. Poll-Hunter singled out two points: (1) Black or African American faculty are likely to leave academia and (2) they leave sooner and at a faster rate than other population groups.

Looking further along the career trajectory, she shared data about department chairs by discipline and ethnicity. Across medical school faculties, there were 3,297 department chairs in 2019, of whom 120 were Black, or 3.6 percent of all chairs. Black faculty were 4 percent of clinical science department chairs and 2.2 percent of basic science department chairs. Related to medical school deans, publicly available AAMC data are disaggregated as underrepresented minorities (URM) or non-underrepresented minorities (not by specific race/ethnicity) and also as serving in a permanent or interim/acting capacity. In 1990, URMs were 6 percent of permanent deans (no interim/acting URM deans). In 2010, there were 10 percent URM permanent deans and 22 percent interim/acting deans. In 2019, the permanent number was the same at 10 percent, and the percentage of interim/acting had decreased to 16 percent. “This tells us there are opportunities, but we need to do a better job, especially with individuals who are in the pipeline as interim and acting deans to support them to get to that next stage of attaining permanent step. We have a pipeline of leaders, but they are not making it to that next step,” she said.

Dr. Poll-Hunter said her intention in sharing the data was not only to act, but to act differently. Based on what is known (e.g., Harris et al., 2018; Sanchez, 2020), she said, mentorship and sponsorship are beneficial, but not everyone has access to this kind of support. She raised several questions, including these two:

1. How can we decrease reliance on person-dependent solutions and consider other strategies to infuse a culture of mentoring in a systems-based way?
2. How can we make information about the pathway to success from pre-faculty to full professorship more transparent and accessible?

Person-to-person programs are critical, she clarified, but she suggested finding ways to expand the number of people reached. She noted the concept of “pre-faculty” as a concept to attract Black individuals and other URMs to careers in academic medicine by providing tools and the “playbook” to get into academia. She also suggested applying practices that work at other points of the continuum, such as holistic reviews (Harris et

al., 2018) used for medical school student recruitment, to increase faculty diversity. In conclusion, she asked, “How can we foster inclusive, anti-racism institutional cultures and climate to facilitate faculty thriving?”

ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE

Dr. Reid reinforced the questions posed by Dr. Poll-Hunter and said he would focus on the early stages of the pipeline. “We cannot produce faculty professionals if they are not proficient in math and science in fourth and eighth grades,” he stated. “These early milestones matter.” He noted some of these issues were being discussed when he was an engineering undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 30 years ago. “It is time to foster systemic change,” he stressed, adding that “engineers look at challenges systemically.”

While working at the United Negro College Fund, Dr. Reid asked the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute to look at where people are falling outside of educational pathways by focusing on children who were ages 0 to 5 at the time of the 2010 census and who could be heading through high school and college later in the decade. The data showed a lower percentage of Latinx and especially Black children made it through to college graduation:

• Among white children (ages 0 to 5 in 2010, 2,622,787 in total), 85 percent completed high school; of those who completed high school, 67 percent enrolled in college; of those, 62 percent graduated in 6 years. Overall, 35 percent in this cohort graduated from college in 10 years.
• Among Latinx children (ages 0 to 5 in 2010, 986,657 in total), 76 percent completed high school; of those, 69 percent enrolled in college; of those, 51 percent graduated in 6 years. Overall, 27 percent of this cohort graduated from college in 10 years.
• Among African American children (ages 0 to 5 in 2010, 568,211 in total), 68 percent completed high school; of those who graduated high school, 62 percent enrolled in college; of those, 40 percent graduated within 6 years. Overall, 16 percent in this cohort graduated college in 10 years, and only 10 percent in low-income communities.

Looking at STEM among all racial and ethnic groups, data from the National Center for Educational Statistics reveal that the “STEM pipeline

is leaking badly,” as Dr. Reid said. From a cohort of 4,012,770 ninth-graders in 2001, 70 percent graduated high school in 2005, and 1,303,050 were college-ready in fall of 2005. Of this number, 21 percent majored in a STEM discipline, but there was an attrition rate of 60 percent. Thus, the group of more than 4 million ninth-graders produced 166,530 STEM graduates by 2011, or only 4 percent of the total. A major drop-off point occurred among students who planned to major in a STEM discipline but did not complete these majors.

Dr. Reid participated in an Association of Public Land Grant Universities comprehensive analysis of diversity in engineering education (APLU, 2018). Overall, it showed a 42 percent increase in bachelor’s degrees in engineering awarded between 2010–2011 and 2015–2016. The number of Black students increased by 35 percent, and there was a 79 percent increase in Hispanic students graduating with engineering degrees. Despite the percentage increases, he noted that the overall number remained low, and only 3.9 percent of engineering degrees awarded went to Black students. At the master’s level, 2 percent of engineering degrees went to Black students. At the doctoral level, the overall increase was 36 percent, but the number is extremely low, with 1.9 percent of all doctoral degrees awarded to Black students.

Gender is another challenge in engineering. “We’re leaving a lot of talent on the table,” he said. Although Black women earn the overall majority of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to African Americans, they earn only 24.9 percent of engineering bachelor’s degrees compared with Black men. Likewise, Black women earn 69.6 percent of all master’s degrees awarded to Black students, but 28.2 percent of engineering master’s degrees.

Dr. Reid said NSBE can play a role in boosting graduation rates. As an overview, NSBE has about 22,000 members, largely undergraduates in more than 300 accredited engineering programs. There is also a precollegiate program with about 4,200 practicing engineers and about 3,650 professional members. A small study (Ross and McGrade, 2016) showed that African Americans enrolled in engineering who are part of the NSBE ecosystem are 10 times more likely to graduate than those who are not involved.

One reason for this outcome, he said, stems from his own research on factors contributing to African American success in higher education, adapted from the social cognitive theory of Albert Bandura (1997). Bandura posited that self-efficacy is affected by environment, personal factors, and behavior; all three must be attended to, rather than any one of them in iso-

lation for a successful outcome. Dr. Reid said he argued in his dissertation that a missing element is a sense of identity related to race, gender, and sexual orientation (see Figure 2-1). He described the outcomes of his study to explain what matters for high-achieving Black males in college also applies to workforce. These factors included (1) high confidence in their academic ability; (2) strong “vertical” relationships with faculty; (3) social integration on campus in “horizontal relationships”; and (4) strong internalized racial identity.

NSBE has worked with other organizations to scale up success to create the “50K Coalition” with a goal to produce 50,000 female, Hispanic, Native American, and Black engineers annually by 2025.¹ Other NSBE resources include a white paper with engagement strategies (Reid et al., 2016), a student retention toolkit, and a “collaborative roadmap” with the Society of Women Engineers and the Women in Engineering ProActive Network that focuses on African American women in undergraduate engineering.

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¹ See https://50kcoalition.org/.

DISCUSSION

Dr. Morgan asked Dr. Poll-Hunter to comment on Dr. Reid’s idea of identity in accounting for the success of African American students. She replied that Bandura’s framework, which she used in her own dissertation in the South Bronx, shows ways to persist in times of stress. Role models and positive reinforcement can be replicated at a systems level to help Black men and women persist and be successful, she said.

In response to a question about academic engineers, Dr. Reid said when he served as an associate dean at MIT, data showed that 92 percent of incoming URMs said they wanted to attend graduate school, but 5 years later, very few enrolled at the master’s and Ph.D. levels. Using social cognitive theory to determine what explains the gap, he and others looked at how to create both vertical (with faculty) and horizontal (with peers on campus) connections. A program began in 2006 with a cohort of about 25 freshmen and sophomores who expressed interest in graduate education and “stayed with them” for 3.5 years. Modeled after the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program,² the group met monthly, conducted research, attended conferences, and had opportunities to make presentations. The program continues today, and Black graduate enrollment grew from about 5 to 13 percent.

NSBE also partners with the Academic and Research Leadership Network, founded at Georgia Tech, and offers an academic track at its annual conventions. A National Science Foundation grant helps send postdoctoral scholars and early-career faculty to the conference.

REFERENCES

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² See https://mcnairscholars.com/about.