Diversifying Advanced Education
Editorial Board
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, October 15, 2001
The University of Texas is trying to lure more U.S. students to graduate school to help offset the startling number of applicants pouring in from around the world.
International students are valued at UT, as they should be, for their talents and for the cultural diversity they add to the campus and to Austin.
But UT is right to focus on attracting more U.S. students. It is important to expand the pool of those who will lead Texas and the nation and those who will discover cures or make scientific breakthroughs. Already, we rely heavily on foreign workers to fill jobs in the high-tech industry because too few Americans are equipped with the math and science skills needed for those jobs.
UT and other Texas colleges should look in their own back yard. And given the changing demographics of Texas, they would be wise to focus more of their recruiting efforts on Hispanic and African American undergraduates. The pool of African American and Hispanic graduate students at UT is pitifully low -- less than 10 percent in the current school year. By contrast, international students make up about 30 percent of all graduate students.
The numbers of international students in graduate engineering, science, physics and math programs are more pronounced. The dearth of American students in those fields signals weaknesses in Texas' public education system that must be addressed if state universities are to remedy the imbalance.
Some of the problems in enticing Americans to graduate school, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, are of UT's own making.
Years of discriminatory admissions policies had soured UT's reputation among minorities in Texas and elsewhere. Generations of African Americans who wanted to pursue graduate studies were forced to do so at out-of-state universities up to the mid-1950s. Before that, graduate programs at UT, Texas A&M University and other Texas schools barred African Americans. Though the state had segregated colleges for black students, those schools didn't offer graduate programs or advanced degrees.
Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court tore down those barriers. But in 1996, a court erected a new barrier in the Hopwood case. The case essentially eliminated admission, scholarship, recruitment and fellowship programs that targeted African American and Hispanic scholars. That has robbed Texas, and two other states affected by the court ruling, of a powerful tool in luring minority students.
Since Hopwood, UT and other Texas colleges have been losing Mexican American and African American graduate students to schools in other states that still offer so-called affirmative action fellowships, said Rick Cherwitz, UT associate dean of graduate studies.
"There was all this negative publicity that reinforced the myth that we were the racist institution we were a number of years ago," Cherwitz said. "Money was the big thing. When we lost our ability to do fellowships for talented minorities, a lot of people who normally applied to UT did not. They went to Berkeley, Michigan and other schools out of state."
UT is moving to correct the imbalance. It will be challenging without the use of affirmative action programs. Two initiatives offer promise in enticing American students to graduate school. Current undergraduates may save time and money by gaining early admission and reserving courses for graduate credit once they have 90 hours. Another initiative targets juniors at Huston-Tillotson, St. Edward's University, Southwest Texas State University and Southwestern University and matches them with UT faculty and student mentors. The latter program presumably will help expand the pool of Mexican Americans and African Americans because St. Edward's and Huston-Tillotson have sizable minority populations.
But as any scientist, lawyer, doctor or engineer will tell you, recruitment must start before college. The seeds of those professions are sown in elementary, junior and high school. There is room for progress on that front: Just more than half the students taking the state's algebra I end-of-course exam last spring passed. Forty-one percent of Austin students passed, but only 20 percent of African Americans passed. We can't fill graduate seats unless we strengthen lower grades, beginning with elementary school.
Scientists, engineers and computer programmers are not born. They are made.