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Black students do a lot worse in STEM programs than white students

Three researchers recently decided to take a look at how different kinds of students do in STEM courses at the university level. So they gathered up more than 100,000 records and then controlled for high school prep and desire to attain a STEM degree. Given that, how did different students respond to modest setbacks? Here's the answer:

A DFW is a low grade (D or F) or a withdrawal from an introductory STEM class. The highlighted column, for example, shows students who are similar in preparation, similar in desire for a STEM degree, and who had one bad result in an introductory STEM course. With all those things the same, how many of them stuck with STEM and eventually graduated?

  • White male: 33%
  • Black male: 16%
  • White female: 28%
  • Black female: 15%

Here's another way of looking at the data. The first column shows graduation rates for students who never had any bad results:

  • Black men graduated at 64% of the rate of white men.
  • Black women graduated at 68% of the rate of white women.

The third column shows graduation rates for students who had several bad results:

  • Black men graduated at 37% of the rate of white men.
  • Black women graduated at 42% of the rate of white women.

Even among equally prepared students, setbacks in intro courses had a far bigger negative effect on Black STEM students than white STEM students. Conversely, setbacks had very little differential effect on male and female students.

Needless to say, this research hangs entirely on whether all these students really had similar high school prep. I can't judge that, so others will have to. But assuming the researchers did at least a creditable job of controlling for preparedness, their results show that Black STEM students are far more likely than white students to abandon STEM in the face of moderate difficulties.

Why is this? Was preparedness not as equal as the researchers thought? Are Black students more likely than white students to believe themselves unqualified in the face of a few early setbacks? Are struggling Black students less likely than white students to seek out help? Or to get it? Are STEM programs full of racists who will use any excuse to boot out Black students who show even the slightest vulnerability? We don't know. But the authors think we ought to look beyond solutions that focus on things like bridge programs, undergraduate research experiences, and remedial courses, since their research suggests that better preparedness doesn't do much good. Instead we should look more deeply at "institutional transformation."

I don't have the chops to comment on this. But this research is only a start, and the first step, obviously, is to confirm or refute it with further studies.

35 thoughts on “Black students do a lot worse in STEM programs than white students

  1. somebody123

    this is sort of anecdata, so take it as you will, but: I'm a Latin instructor at a medium-sized, highly-ranked private university. Three times a semester I ask my students to self-assess their performance, by writing a short narrative about how they're doing in the class and by giving themselves a letter grade. I've been doing this for many years.

    Regardless of their other performance in the class, women and students of color rate themselves lower than white men do, even when they've performed similarly on the actual assignments. I've never compiled the data across multiple semesters, but I'd say they rate themselves about a whole grade lower than white men do. This is top of mind for me right now because I just did the first round of assessments: I had a student (black man, freshman, philosophy major) rate himself a C and say he was struggling in the class, while he's received As on all the quizzes and performs very well on in-class tasks.

    I can't speak to all the psychology of it, but I have years of self-assessments that show that white and male students think more highly of their own performance, and I have no doubt that that translates into more persistence in difficult subjects.

    1. Yikes

      Indeed, the most obvious explanation is sometimes right.

      There is more to doing well in college and beyond then "preparation."

      College is its own challenge, which, among other things, requires students to stick with it when, inevitably, the work gets harder. Especially in STEM fields, the work gets more advanced all the way through grad school and then on to working in the profession.

      Is it at all surprising that white students might be 50% more confident than minority students? Or that white students might have 50% more support? Its not like the need for support magically ends in college.

      I would like to see the same stats based on socioeconomics: poor, lower middle, middle, well off.

    2. Solarpup

      Working in STEM, and having given career advice to lots of students over the years, there's one conversation I've had with male students that I've never had with female students. "Why are you applying for that job? You don't have the background or qualifications for that." Mind you, it's not that I don't want students to switch up their interests, but in all of those cases I would have preferred them to come to me first with, "I've been doing A, but would like to switch to B, what thoughts do you have about how I can make that switch from A to B?" I've met way too many men who have just thought, "My greatness at A just naturally shows that *of course* I will be great at B."

      Conversely, I've had way more conversations with women than men that went along the lines of, "Why aren't you applying for B? It's a little bit of a stretch, but it's something that you would be good at and might interest you. With a little work, you could put in an application for that."

      Unfortunately, my experience with URM is much more limited (my field is so-so for women, it's terrible for blacks and hispanics). But with men/women I have seen the differences that lack of mentoring/encouragement/self-assessment can make.

    3. bethby30

      Interesting. Back in the days of the dinosaurs I went to a college that was just starting to allow women to enter traditionally male fields of study. I was always afraid to admit I needed help to either my professors — all male — or fellow students (also male) fearing it would just reinforce the obvious bias against women being in my classes. It was clear that at least some of them assumed I would fail. I did better than several of them in tests but I was still reluctant to admit I didn’t understand something.

  2. Citizen Lehew

    "Instead we should look more deeply at 'institutional transformation.'"

    Asian women are crushing White women. Much like Asian kids always crush White kids in almost every academic statistic regardless of grade. Should we assume our institutions actually like Asians more than Whites?

  3. wahoofive

    "their research suggests that better preparedness doesn't do much good". This is not what their research says. It says that preparedness by itself doesn't erase the racial achievement gap.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      I can't imagine how "preparedness" is measured. Do we simply assume that two schools offering the same course with the same syllabus are giving equal preparedness? That's not our experience, is it, when comparing schools in different sociological environments?

      1. bizarrojimmyolsen

        From the study: "We control for past academic preparation via each student’s high school GPA (20) and ACT composite test score (standardiz- ing both before use in models)."

        To me this seems a terrible measure of actual preparation.

        1. Daniel Berger

          Actually, in our experience an ACT score is a good predictor of whether a student will succeed in a STEM major -- at least at our institution.

          Students' grades don't always align with their ACT ranking when they're above the low end of the range, but we find that students with a composite ACT of less than about 23 struggle, and less than about 21 mostly don't succeed at all.

  4. middleoftheroaddem

    I am affiliated with so called elite university (sub 10% admission’s rate). While the aforementioned university does a respectable job of graduating Pell eligible and students of color, the track record in STEM fields is disappointing, when compared with the broader university.

    Fields such Chemistry, Physics and Engineering require students to enter college with a high level of math (statistics etc) capacity: unfortunately, too many low income students struggle in STEM courses. The impact, lots of kids of color enter the university with STEM plans and graduate as a Sociology or an Ethnic Studies major: the career impacts, when one compares Chemistry to Ethnic Studies is dramatic.

  5. Jim Carey

    Here's a clue: STEAM students do better in STEM subjects than STEM-only students - where A = art. Why? Because STEM is about getting stuff done and art is about bringing people together so we're not all "getting stuff done" heading off in different directions. Put another way, it's hard to teach STEM without teaching art for the same reason that it's hard to teach someone how to drive that has no place to go.

    Another way to get a subset of society to believe they have no place to go is to marginalize them based on some entirely arbitrary basis like skin color.

    STEAM references:
    Being Human podcast E112: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V65JIAM_LfY
    Being Human podcase E34: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16TmHFtDsI

    1. bethby30

      I have been thrilled to see that the new magnet school in my city is a STEAM, not STEM school. I hate the we now view education as primarily preparation for the job market, not to be effective citizens in our democracy. I am glad to see any attempt to broaden, not narrow, the education our kids get.

  6. golack

    Simple--if you fail in an intro course, you can't just move on--you need to re-do that course or move to another major and taking their intro course(s). This shows if the students can afford to re-do a course, either between semesters or over the summer and/or potential stay enrolled for an extra year.

    1. Solar

      Yes, I was thinking about the same thing. To me this is a reflection of resource (ie. money) disparity. Black students are more likely to have limited resources, so having to retake a course they already struggled with is more likely to have them look into changing fields.

      Like two shooters presented with multiple targets. If shooter A has six bullets and shooter B only has 3, shooter A is more likely to give it another go at a hard target they already missed, while shooter B, after a miss is more likely to look for a different (and relatively easier) target knowing they have to make each shot count given the bullet disadvantage.

    2. ey81

      It would be good if they had controlled for family income. This explanation is plausible, but typically studies that do control for family income still find that race has a much bigger explanatory effect than income, so I would need to see the results of controlling for that variable before I came to any conclusion.

  7. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Blacks have way less capital and way less social capital than white people. They also have lower incomes. Unless you have controlled for those confounding variables, I don't think you have done your research properly.

  8. jte21

    John McWhorter had an interesting column in the NYT a little while back about the persistent disparities between esp. Black students and white ones when it came to things like standardized testing. He suggested it had to do with the socio-linguistic environment small Black kids grow up in vs. their white peers, even from disadvantaged backgrounds. White (and many Asian) parents tend to raise their kids through a process of Q&A and encouraging them to remember abstract facts as they grow up. Black and Latino styles of parenting , McWhorter suggests, often involve a more "how to live in the world" kind of parenting that involves using language for more practical kinds of knowledge. One's not necessarily better than the other in terms of producing healthy, well-adjusted adults, but the "world as set of questions and answers" inculcates in kids a certain kind of learning style that standardized tests and college STEM classes reward.

  9. cephalopod

    This is one thing that Social Emotional Learning is supposed to help change. There is still a lot of belief that people are just born good or bad at math, and there is nothing you can do about that. And we have a culture that loves to emphasize that the people who are born good at math are White men and Asians.

    Another factor may be informal support. When a field skews toward a particular gender or race you end up with some new people having a lot more informal experience with the field and emotional support. It's just easier to plug away at something if you have family members who have already done it or friends who are in the same boat. Even if they aren't offering help with assignments, just the encouragement of "I've been there and you can do it, too" is a big deal.

    I contrast my experience in grad school (many relatives have advanced degrees) and my best friend's (no relatives with even a bachelor's degree). My struggles were met with a ton of empathy and anecdotes to let me know my issues were normal and surmountable. Hers were often met with questioning of why she thought she could do it at all.

  10. Joshua Curtis

    If you are getting a merit based scholarship, bad grades can lead to a loss of funding. This may lead students on merit based scholarships to pursue easier course loads. All the comments about confidents are on point as well. I thought this was also worth pointing out.

      1. humanchild66

        Yeah a lot of the commenting in this thread is from intelligent, well-informed people so you may need to go away. Bye.

        1. Justin

          I agree we should ignore this culture of hatred and violence among young blacks. It’s not like I can do anything about it. And they don’t seem to care all that much. Go figure.

  11. Goosedat

    The three students I know who in the recent past graduated from HS STEM curriculums all failed their chosen university engineering programs. Covid, (leisure) Culture, Calculus appear to the the reasons why. These were typical upper middle class European American students who could not cope with the independence of university life and the affluence provided by their parents. STEM appears to be a prestige curriculum rather than a disciplined one.

    1. humanchild66

      There's a BAD, BAD tradition/history of intro college STEM courses being "weedout" courses, more or less designed to exclude as many people as possible. One does not even need to presume racist or even malicious intent. It's just the unquestioned culture of STEM education. Gotta make sure they keep their med school and grad school acceptance rates up, and this is accomplished by converting as many freshmen pre-meds to "Global Studies" (or whatever) majors by squeezing then out at Intro Chem.

  12. lithiumgirl

    This is, in large part, due to the power of stereotyping. Negative stereotypes have a profound effect on those who are stereotyped even from an early age (see comment above by the professor who has students do self-assessments for an example). I recommend a book called Whistling Vivaldi by a psychologist named Claude Steele for more about this. Really opened my eyes!

    1. Narsham

      There's a fair amount of research on this topic: white students see their successes or failures as occurring independently of any stereotypes and expectations based on their race. Black students, especially, see themselves as being evaluated within the framework of racial stereotypes, and worse, they also perceive their successes or failures as being evaluated within that context. This phenomenon is related to the cringeworthy situation where the lone black student is singled out to explain what "black people" think about a topic, where white students are almost never asked to provide the "white perspective".

      And this has been known for a while. See, for example, an article in the Atlantic online titled "Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students."

      Also, the study I found from 2020 says STEM faculty are almost 90% white at the university level. Most 1st year STEM students already face a huge set of challenges; adding those associated with race and stereotype threat is a double-whammy if none of the faculty available to you when you first start a program have any idea of those extra challenges, much less any personal experience.

      1. humanchild66

        Also interesting is the work that shows that while PhD (biological and biomedical sciences) attainment of individuals from minoritized groups, esp African American, has been slowly increasing, we are not seeing the same increase in attainment of a faculty positions in those fields. There are many complex reasons for this, including better, financially more rewarding options outside fo academia, but the impact on faculty diversity is pretty clear,

  13. humanchild66

    I've been reading a lot about persistence in STEM at the graduate level and the impressing that I am getting from this reading is that "squishy" stuff, like confidence, sense of purpose, belonging, and identity formation are really, really important.

    I read a study about five or so years ago that suggested that cohort cohesion in first year PhD programs made a measurable difference in first-to-second year retention.

  14. ScentOfViolets

    Oh, dear lord: It's common knowledge among those teaching STEM students who are not as well prepped as they otherwise should have been but were accepted into a STEM program anyway can make up for lost ground in any subject save one. Math. Not having had any exposure to the physical sciences in high school is not an especially crippling impediment when it comes to earning a degree in chemistry or physics or whatever. You can catch up if you put in the work. But poor math prep? That's like a one-armed paraplegic trying to make ends meet as a pro on the competitive swim circuit.

    But these researches don't have the stones to, you know, actually say that out loud, damn their eyes. They want to draw public attention to these STEM disparaties, but they want somebody else to take the heat for stating the obvious.

  15. quickquestion

    Do black kids do worse or do kids from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas do worse (and there happens to be a large overlap)? Let's help people, not races...

  16. Jfree707

    I am not sure that this is an area that we want to be militant in achieving racial representation, there are all sorts of cultural/social reasons that can explain disproportionate representation. It’s not that black people are stupid and incompetent, STEM is just not their bag. I would continue efforts to increase participation because we need more black and Latino genius, but in some regards allow freedom of water to find its own level and if that means our national powerhouse of STEM genius is Asian American woman, I mean have we really fallen short somehow!

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