Dr. Richard Tapia
Rice UniversityNational Science Board Convocation
On Graduate and Postdoctoral Education:
The Federal Role
October 9, 1997S&E Graduate/Postdoctoral Education: Needs and Issues
Diana has given me five minutes, so I will be brief. First of all, at lunch, Tom Appelquist and I observed something that in dealing with the problems we are dealing with here today, in contrast to mathematics, the solution rarely lies at an extreme point. The truth is somewhere in between. I am very happy today with the things that we have heard. Our delicate job is to find out where is "in between" the extreme points.
My comments are restricted to certain things that either I believe I have experienced, or I worked with. And they are going to be restricted to essentially diversity or inclusiveness, whichever you want to call it.
A couple of premises people have been using that were premised, maybe we could call them global national concerns, or dangers, if you wish. But that underrepresentation endangers the health of the nation and not the health of the various professions. The health of the professions are going to go on -- we have already learned that, we know how to do that.
We often import solutions and, we have been for many years. It is the health of the Nation. It is what Marye Anne Fox was talking about -- the jobs. If science, engineering, and technology are the backbone of our country; if we do not get these under-represented groups, where they have the choices that Marye Anne was talking about, then we are going to be in bad shape.
Second premise is that we have to be sure that we do not end up with two disjointed cycles, and that is minority institutions and majority institutions. I think that having two disjointed cycles is unhealthy for both the educational and professional communities. So we have to really work at mixing and have strong interaction between the two. Separate and equal, even if they really are equal, is not going to be healthy.
Two admissions and recruitment obstacles--what I would like to do is give you my experiences. The inappropriate use of the standardized test is probably the underrepresented minorities worse enemy. Universities demonstrate an inexplicable addiction to using one-dimensional qualifiers like SAT's and GRE’S. I have seen departments in our university argue that 95th percentile is significantly different than the 94th or 93rd and use it at that level.
As a Nation we tend to equate lower scores at all levels with lower standards. Certainly this is the terminology that was used in Bakke, and the terminology that was used in Hopwood. Somehow these scores are God-given and that better scores mean you are better qualified. The top versus the bottom and the middle. Certainly I agree that scoring very low on these tests means a lot. In fact, I think it correlates quite well with failure. We have done these studies at Rice that show that below a certain level on the SAT undergraduate students tend not to succeed.
On the other hand, trying to use the score at the upper level where we think it means so much, is wrong. I think that most of the students we are dealing with are in the middle. What I recommend and what we use that has led to Rice's success is what I call the threshold approach to standardized tests. Basically, everybody above a certain threshold is deemed acceptable and then use other criteria to argue those differences. And that has been extremely successful at the undergraduate level at Rice. We have been spending a lot of time on the standardized tests, so I will not go into it anymore, but the question that we do have to ask is: Do we know how to evaluate creativity? One of the things that we do is equate creativity with precocity. We place extreme value on precocious and model behavior. And, our evaluation systems definitely favor the focused prodigy.
In March of 1996 I was on the NSF review committee and the committee to review education and human resource development. There were four or five of us and we looked at various awards of fellowships that had been given to students. And essentially every student that had been awarded one of these awards had focused on science by the age of ten. We had the extremely precocious males who had gone to prep schools, and every one of them were extremely impressive and every one of them had focused on science by the age of ten. We all felt that if our children had started to think of science at the age of fourteen it was already too late.
So we wrote this following statement to the National Science Foundation: "The committee feels that the implementation of the current evaluation criteria concerning the quality of the applicants overemphasizes the focused prodigy profile." It is impossible to disentangle productivity due to privilege from productivity due to talent. Reviewers and panelists generally fall back on this profile as a means of evaluating candidates even though it may not be a good predictor of scientific creativity or success.
I will not go into retention issues. But basically, there is something that I call the moment of truth. We have to have smooth transitions. The moment of truth means that when minority students enter into a different environment or when a woman student enters into a different environment. The moment of truth’ examples would be a minority student comes from a minority university to a majority university. Moment of truth’ could be when a student, an excellent student, tries to enter into the world of research.
What can federal support agencies do? I think one of the things that not only NSF but all of the federal agencies could do is reward successes. We have alluded to that here a few times. The unit can be the department, the individual, the school. But certainly with the activities that I have done, the Sloan Foundation came in and looked at what we were doing, and they said to Rice: We are not going to give Rice any money but we are going to give Richard Tapia a third of a million dollars to do this activity over the next three years.
Exxon has given me money. Shell has given me money. And it says: You are doing a good job, use this as you wish to further the support of women and under-represented minorities. Another thing I think that the agencies can do is evaluate the evaluation criteria.
Why have we succeeded at Rice? Our department of computational applied mathematics is in a very selective university, and our department is one of the top research departments in the country. In our area, we are 56 percent women, 35 percent underrepresented minorities -- that is split pretty evenly between Hispanic and African-American, and we are no more than 30 percent foreign students. Of the foreign students that we have, most of them are Latin American. So we have chosen, or certainly the chairs of the graduate missions have chosen, an obligation.
Being here in Texas we find that we have an obligation more to Latin America, Central America, South America, and Mexico than we do to China and to India, and we actually show that bias. What makes our program work is critical mass; a student does not feel alone, assessment and correction early account for deficiencies, and we let them take undergraduate courses, if indeed, they are deficient. Flexibility in implementation of the requirements; a very strong advocate, which is me. Strong support system, seniors, and graduate students -- they watch out and they mentor junior graduate students.
We have very strong professional development programs, very similar to the things Karan and Brian were talking about. I have a program called Spend a Summer with a Scientist. And it is for graduates and undergraduates. And the grads mentor the undergrads, the undergrads work with high school students; it is a complete system. We have professional development seminars throughout the year. A lot of professional activity. With the money that I have been given, our students travel, give presentations, and believe that they belong as much as anyone else.
Women and minority students, on average take longer to obtain the Ph.D., but they do succeed, they are retained, and they end up in very productive positions. The students that we have get excellent jobs in industry. They recruit highly in industry, they fit extremely well. They do not typically fit the traditional research university mold. They are not hired or recruited for faculty positions at research universities. They do fit the mold that Bob Suzuki was talking about earlier, and, in fact, a lot of them do go to these so-called non-research universities.
My final point is that universities for years have solved their needs by solving the easy problem and not the hard one, and they are solving the problems through immigration.
I think that industry--we heard from Paul Cuneo this morning--is now looking at this solution, saying we are now going to solve our needs through immigration. I believe that is solving the easy problem and the hard problem is the one that we are all here concerned with.