There is an alarming dearth of Black P.h.D.s, especially in STEM fields. And there doesn’t seems to be any improvement, as not a single Black student earned a doctoral degree in 2017.
This is a far-reaching problem as it also results in a lack of diversity in teaching faculty.
“Less than 6 percent of full-time faculty members at institutions across the country are Black. Many factors coalesce to bring about that dearth of Black faculty, but one of the most significant is the perpetual scarcity of Black doctoral-degree recipients,” The Atlantic reported.
About 50,000 people earned PhD.s from 2002 to 2017, and during this time there was only a slight increase in the number of Black graduates — from 5.1 percent to 5.4 percent, according to the National Science Foundation. And, in the STEM fields, there was not one doctoral degree was awarded to a Black person in the United States.
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Why is this the case? There are a number of theories as to
According to a recent report from ACE, 50 percent of Black doctoral students were enrolled at for-profit colleges meaning more student debt as 95 percent of those students secured loans and wound up with an average debt of more than $120,000.
Also, some Black students say they have been dissuaded from higher degrees because of how those programs treat Black people.
“You hear a lot of horror stories from Black faculty and Black doctoral students,” Felecia Commodore, an assistant professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, said.
“A number of Black students don’t know if they can do it,” Commodore said. “It’s our job”—not just Black faculty, but all faculty—“to help them do it,” not only while they’re in the program, but after they’ve entered the job market as well.
One former Ph.D. student found the program almost unbearable.
“The racism that ran rampant through my graduate program was like a swift, hard punch to the gut for me as a naïve, first-year graduate student. I had not even attended my first official graduate course before a fellow student had complimented my ‘ghetto booty’; despite my upbringing in suburbia,” Eric Anthony Grollman, now a sociology professor at the University of Richmond, wrote in Insider Higher Education.
He advised Black students to prepare themselves.
“For Black prospective graduate students, I recommend, as a starting point, to be aware that racism is the norm in academe. Even if you are generally shielded from microaggressions, racism is deeply entrenched in the operation of graduate departments, universities, disciplines and professional organizations. It affects who and what gets funded, who and what gets published where, who gets hired and tenured, who gets admitted, who graduates, and so forth,” Grollman wrote.
And, he added that Ph.D. students need to be careful about “playing the game” too much to try and fit in.
“Navigating racism in a supposedly anti-racist or at least race-neutral environment is a messy affair. You need to find a balance between ‘playing the game’ to succeed in graduate school (by mainstream standards) and authenticity. I made the mistake of ‘souling out’ to such a high level that my mental health suffered,” Grollman wrote.
