Despite a decades-long national effort and recent enrollments gains, African Americans and Hispanics are still significantly under-represented among recipients of Ph.Ds in the United States, a new report from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation finds.

According to the report, Diversity & the Ph.D., the two groups comprise 32 percent of all U.S. citizens between the ages of twenty-five and forty (the typical age range for Ph.D. candidates), but only 11 percent of all U.S. citizens earning Ph.Ds and only 7 percent of all doctoral recipients (including international students). "We hear this terrible phrase 'diversity fatigue,'" said Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a contributor to the report, "but the numbers make it clear: We still have a great expertise gap in the United States. Our next generation of college students will include dramatically more students of color, but their teachers will remain overwhelmingly white."

Created as part of the foundation's Responsive Ph.D. initiative, the report looks at the mechanisms through which foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies have sought to recruit and retain more minority students to doctoral programs, and highlights circumstances that increasingly impede their work. Chief among them are the effect of recent court challenges to affirmative action, reduced fellowship support, reduced visibility, limited communication among programs, and too little encouragement in the earlier stages of education for minority students to consider pursuing a doctorate.

The report, which was sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies, presses for the coordination of various stand-alone efforts into a single national agenda, and urges more rigorous measurement of program results in order to address what Weisbuch calls "the continuing near-exclusion of a third of our population from intellectual leadership." It also calls for more efforts sooner — from middle school through community college — to present doctoral education as a promising and relevant career path for students of color.

To read or download the full report (60 pages, PDF), visit: http://www.woodrow.org/newsroom/News_Releases/
WW_Diversity_PhD_web.pdf.