Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Brain Drain'

http://chronicle.com/article/Minority-Students-Needed-in/48568/

by fogus • 17 years ago

14 25 17 years ago

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

This is a serious issue, and thanks for sharing the article. The president of the Mathematical Association of America, David Bressoud, was at the hearing mentioned in the submitted article calling for more programs to encourage women and ethnic minorities to participate in higher education in math. This is an ongoing concern of professional organizations of mathematicians in the United States.

But just as a possibly illuminating contrary view, the controversial article by Philip Greenspun

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

may be on point here. Maybe there are better opportunities for young people who are being recruited into math and science than the opportunities provided by math and science careers.

(Note on personal background: my oldest son, who is in the process of applying to colleges when he doesn't plan his start-up, intends to major in math and computer science, and has taken upper-division courses in each subject already. But he is not part of the population groups mentioned in the submitted article.)

TheElder• 17 years ago

>At a briefing session organized by Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, a Texas Democrat and chairman of the House education committee's higher-education subcommittee, three mathematics and science professors advocated institutional programs that had succeeded in attracting and retaining black, Hispanic, and American-Indian students.

What would happen if our government attempted to specifically attract and retain white Americans in math, physics, and engineering? Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea, since that is the group who historically excelled in those fields and probably have the most interest in that area, while affirmative action type programs seem to hinder the careers of minority students who end up not being able to handle the rigor of engineering, maths, law school, etc.

>UCLA professor Richard H. Sander published an article in the November 2004 issue of the Stanford Law Review that questioned the effectiveness of affirmative action in law schools. The article presents a study that, among other things, shows that half of all black law students rank near the bottom of their class after the first year of law school, and that black law students are more likely to drop out of law school and to fail the bar exam. The article offers a tentative estimate that the production of new black lawyers in the United States would grow by eight percent if affirmative action programs at all law schools were ended, as less qualified black students would instead attend less prestigious schools where they would be more closely matched with their classmates, and thus perform better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unite...

>Does affirmative action hurt minorities? Racial preferences may be setting up many black and Latino law students for failure. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-sand...

parse_tree2• 17 years ago

Those groups tend to score way below average on standardized math tests. So it doesn't seem like a stretch to suggest this project could end up just pumping up the number of "scientists and mathematicians" by watering down the talent level of the whole field (and doing nothing to increase the number of Ed Wittens, Andrew Wiles, Terry Taos, etc, whom I suspect are a lot more important than 1000 mediocre scientists who scraped by on affirmative action).

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

Quite right. Just because group X is underrepresented in Y does not imply that group X is a readily available source of Y's.

It's distinctly possible that the cheapest and most effective way to increase the number of scientists would be to recruit more white/asian american men. Without looking carefully at the numbers it is impossible to say.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

Evidence for what you say in your comment? Citations, please?

parse_tree2• 17 years ago

SAT Mathematics 2009 average scores per group:

Asian: 587

White: 536

American Indian: 493

Hispanic: 461

Black: 426

Overall: 515

from here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125121641858657345.html

wsprague3• 17 years ago

At the risk of being downvoted, let me rant: We need to reinstate hard-assed, traditional, back to basics curriculum. Period. Get rid of teacher credentialing systems and touchy-feely bullshit, and have kids start memorizing formulas, diagramming sentences, and reading classics again. And have them do A LOT of homework. And quit telling them and their parents that the primary thing is to have fun and feel satisfied -- it isn't.

Then we won't have a goddam brain drain -- it is an embarrassment to the American people that we can't educate ourselves.

bilbo0s5• 17 years ago

Wish I could upvote this more.

Doesn't matter the color of the student, EVERYONE should be getting pushed right now.

Bravo wsprague

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

I have a somewhat different kind of suggestion for what would most improve math teaching in the United States. See some of my favorite articles on the subject by mathematicians

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ame...

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/ind...

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

for the idea that proper mathematical education includes learning certain facts by heart through practice, but also includes a lot of flexibility of thinking and making deep connections between seemingly unrelated subjects.

wsprague3• 17 years ago

My only concern is that we have to come up with a plan that can be explained to the 100,000 or primary school teachers in the USA. Rarefied curriculums are like rarefied programming languages -- they don't "take", or they just distract. We need a Python, not an ML to explain to folks, and, honestly, "drill the crap out of your students and test them regularly" is easy to explain in a staff meeting... and would be a vast improvement over the BS that passes for education these days.

alextp• 17 years ago

I agree with you in principle but not in practice. Yes, feel-good bulshit is bad, yes, people should study more, etc. I just don't think you would really like to breed a country full of tied-down people trained to death to repeat and worship whatever it is they learned at school.

I tend to think of myself as intelligent enough, and I know for sure that I would never survive school with drilled exercises and a classical education (I find most of the classic authors dull and naive; latin is an overrated language; the greek philosophers, specially, only sound smart when read with tons of allowances like one reads the bible). Also, any sort of education focused on getting exercises and drills "right" without discussion will only breed conformists and people without creativity.

I don't know. The way it sounds to me is that there is a worship of some sorts of classical culture and discipline that I find deplorable. What I would change in american schooling would be: more geography, real history (without turning famous people such as the founding fathers or Ben Franklin or Abe Lincoln into mythological images and instead studying them in their socio-political context with all flaws included), less emphasis on pseudo-cultural non-academic activities (debating club, etc) in admissions office.

bilbo0s5• 17 years ago

On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981. At which time he famously said that if anyone had a problem with it he'd '...see their resignation on his desk in the morning.'

EO 9981 was not simply a political move. Our military strategists saw during WWII that it would be decidedly foolish for us to continue fighting wars with one hand tied behind our backs.

Around this same time, a wave of statutes swept the nation that made it illegal for most Americans under the age of 16 to drop out of High School. Do not suppose that these things are coincidental. They are common sense steps that had to be taken to address the new realities that were rapidly developing in the post WWII world.

The world is today, again, undergoing a process of rapid geopolitical and social change. Strategists deep in the bowels of the American Government have looked into the future, and again, they find themselves wanting to change what they see looking back at them.

FACT: China has more high school honors students than the United States has high school students. That's right. If you take every high school student in the US, the poor students and the good students, China has more students than that in ONLY its high honors programs.

Look, the global economy will be the battlefield of choice in the future. We do not intend to charge onto that battlefield with one hand tied behind our backs.

The only thing wrong with this article, in my opinion, is that it excludes the recruitment of white Americans. We SHOULD be making sweeping policy changes to address these issues. Immigration is not going to get us out of it. I work half the time in Ningbo or Paris myself. How long before Indians and Indonesians figure out that the smart CVs are flowing to China not California? They are not blind.

I feel like Truman, if you have a problem with being more aggressive with American students with respect to instilling the disciplines of math and science, feel free to leave the country. It is past time that we dealt with this.

izg2• 17 years ago

I agree that this should be inclusive of everybody, regardless of ethnicity or gender. The goal is to just have more stem majors. The more diverse the better.

I won't get into the other topics.

izg2• 17 years ago

First, this isn't about affirmative action--this isn't about establishing quotas. It's about funding programs that will help attract and retain minority students in stem majors. If you don't understand that key difference, let me know. And if you don't understand the value of such programs, then you fail to realize what it will take for any company or country to compete globally.

Second, there are too many factors at play to just dismiss a student's abilities to start the next google, for example, by just assessing standardized test scores--especially, to assess his/her potential by how well on average his group/ethnicity performs. parse_tree, go back to my first point.

Such programs, I don't think, are intended to have immediate results. The goal is to retain as many people who are interested in stem majors as possible. Yes, but I think the biggest impact will come as a result of their kids having much more exposure and such people understanding the value of such programs that they reach out to others.

Finally, I think a lot would be best spent at an early age--early in a child's development. If you think a person's abilities are tied solely to genetics, you're wrong. Nurture plays an important role, and I've seen enough evidence to support that. Funding programs that compensate for parents not having an adequate education (and thus have to work multiple jobs, don't read enough to kids, etc) to offer their kids a good start.

Quick poll: of all you hackers here, how many had parents in stem majors? How many had parents who went to secondary school? These are much better indicators as to how well a person will do in life than race or gender. Think about it. Many of you played with legos. Did you ask your parents to buy you legos? Or did they buy them for you?

tiffani3• 17 years ago

That article has a point, but it doesn't serve any purpose other than highlighting a problem we already know about--let's leave the dead horses alone. As a minority (black female), it's nothing new.

> "Attracting students' interest to fields where they have been traditionally underrepresented is a challenge, Ms. Bozeman said."

It's a challenge for reasons the article doesn't even mention. A certain elementary school I volunteered at during college in DC brings to mind why it might be an issue with minorities. The school was predominantly minority--hispanics and blacks--and it seemed like the school system had forgotten about the kids. (Yes, we know many DC schools have serious problems.) Some of them didn't know their ABCs, had trouble with numbers, and couldn't even write their own names. Granted this was a kindergarten class, but it wasn't as if my friends and I showed up to volunteer on the first day of school for them either. We asked some of the kids if their parents helped them with their homework, etc. and most of them said no. The school itself lacked basic supplies (no pencils with erasers for kindergartners??). The problem starts wayyy before we've even gotten the kids to the college level and by then, I tend to think it's a little late to be thinking of how to deal with it.

Kids have to be set up earlier than high school and college for this stuff. And I don't mean pulling a few kids aside from each class for academically gifted enrichment activities. There definitely needs to be a wholesale overhaul of education in such a way that all kids think about those kinds of careers.

With that being said, I think the basic premise of the article is flawed, too. I think we're experiencing a brain-drain all across the board and it just happens to be the case where minorities stand out once again. I grew up in a pretty diverse environment (military brat) and I can't say all of my white, asian, and indian friends were flocking to AP Calculus either! lol. As a matter of fact, most of my non-minority friends from high school who were considered by teachers and students alike to be smart actually didn't even go into fields like math or science--they tended to prefer journalism or law--with the occasional biology major.

This is an issue affecting everybody.

bilbo0s5• 17 years ago

So . . . uhhh . . .

What is your suggested solution.

Or are you just telling us that we can never solve our problems, so we should just forget it?

No one here is suggesting that the solution rests with bettering the education of only minorities. Everyone who has made a suggestion, has put forth the idea that we need to better the education of EVERYONE. "Setting up kids early . . ." for this stuff is EXACTLY what everyone is suggesting.

tiffani3• 17 years ago

On the contrary, my comment definitely didn't say anything about improving only the education of minorities and I definitely didn't say "just forget it." The article is about minorities, though, is it not? And I think, implicitly, the article points at the idea that we do have to address minority education (especially in the greater context of educating everybody) if we want more minority scientists and engineers. My own experience points in that direction and if we could talk to the folks in the article, I'm sure they'd say the same.

I mentioned how the article doesn't necessarily highlight anything new and that it's a problem everybody's facing. Sure, my comment mentioned minority education, but in no way was I insinuating that we only should care about just educating minorities now. That's a torrid oversimplification (and misrepresentation) of anything I said above.

wsprague3• 17 years ago

And one more thing!!

We always need to remember that there are subtle ways that students get sorted into "smart" and "not-smart", even when we are trying to be objective:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

thras• 17 years ago

Huh, they've got plenty of Asians and Jews already. What are they complaining about?

Looks at article

Oh, "underrepresented minority students." That's the code that colleges use to tell Chinese and Korean students that they don't get any affirmative action money. We didn't mean that kind of minority.

The sort of minority they want is the kind that is bad at math and science. After all, it'll be any day now that we figure out how to stop Blacks and Hispanics from under-performing in every intellectual field of endeavor. And then we'll have more of them than anyone else!

geebee• 17 years ago

Mr. Castillo-Chavez, the texas congressman who is so concerned about math and science degrees, has a bachelor's and master's in business administration. I was a little surprised - usually the politicians fretting about the scarcity of Americans in science are lawyers.

A recent study by the RAND institute concluded that pay for science and engineering graduates has been lagging badly behind other professions, and that the low interest of Americans in these fields will change once pay catches up.

Like that Onion article: "study finds 98% of commuters favor public transportation for others." Seems the same for science and engineering careers.

Maybe we need a real role model. When Barak Obama speaks, people listen, and when our president emphasized the importance of science careers, I'm certain that he inspired hundreds of thousands of minority students in America to one day become lawyers who encourage engineering degrees for others.

Minority Students Needed in Math and Science to Fight 'Brain Drain'

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