Impact of Mentoring and Enrichment Activities on the Academic Careers of Underrepresented STEM Doctoral Students

摘要

While much national attention has been focused on increasing the participation of underrepresented minorities (URMs) in the STEM fields, considerable gaps remain in terms of educational attainment between URMs and other racial/ethnic groups. Differences are particularly stark at the doctoral levels, where underrepresented minorities accounted for only 3.3% of STEM PhDs awarded in 2005. A recent longitudinal study of minority PhDs in STEM disciplines found that long-term academic success (i.e., placement and tenure for URM faculty members) requires long-term development both within and beyond graduate school. Such training must include multi-faceted professional development (e.g., grant writing, public speaking, and publishing research), as well as social dynamics such as networking within the STEM community. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has responded to these challenges with the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. AGEP seeks to increase the number of underrepresented students receiving doctoral degrees in STEM disciplines - with particular attention upon increasing the number who will enter the professoriate in these disciplines and serve as mentors to promising minority scholars in the educational pipeline. This paper seeks to examine the longitudinal impact of one such program at a large engineering school in the Southeast. The program Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) was designed to provide a set of co-curricular enrichment activities that foster the necessary mentoring of underrepresented minorities. The research design utilized a survey of alumni (who graduated between 2003 and 2011), and it measured their employment outcomes and perceptions of career preparation. Utilizing parametric (ANOVA) and non-parametric statistical methods, participants in the program were compared to two control groups - URM STEM graduates who did not participate in the mentorship program and non-URM STEM graduates. The research questions of interest: 1) Are doctoral recipients who participated in the FACES program more likely to gain employment in academia? 2) Are there differences in self-reported professional skills for former FACES fellows when compared to other URM doctoral recipients as well as to non-URM PhDs? Results demonstrate that FACES participants were over 2.5 times more likely to report working in a faculty or academic professional position than were the non-URM STEM graduates, and were nearly twice as likely compared with URM graduates without the program experience. Additionally, on seven of a set of 15 knowledge, skills, and abilities items, ANOVA results demonstrated higher levels of preparation for program participants. The paper will describe specific programmatic approaches that were effective in URM graduate persistence and subsequent placement into academic (as opposed to industrial) careers.