Coming in second usually isn’t a big deal. But, when it is a tiny, historically Black women’s college placing No. 2 to a fellow HBCU with a student body just more than three times its size in a national science- and math-related survey, it seems that it is something to celebrate.
Atlanta’s Spelman College, an all-female liberal arts college with a student body of about 2,200, sent 150 Black students on to Ph.D. degrees in the traditionally male disciplines of science and engineering from 1997 to 2006, according to a survey released by the National Science Foundation. That’s more than any other undergraduate program in the country besides the considerably larger, coed Howard University. Howard, which has about 7,000 undergraduates, sent 224 on to advanced degrees.
“This is not surprising at all; we push our students and challenge them to do well,” says Associate Provost of Research Lily McNair, who insists that the accolade is the direct result of seeds planted by former math professor Etta Falconer, who established a summer program in 1972 to recruit more students interested in science. “Professor Falconer had a dream to attract more Black women into the science and math fields and that dream has been nurtured and supported over the years by all of our presidents, administration and faculty.”
Historically Black colleges and universities, including Spelman’s “brother school” – all-male Morehouse College – claimed eight of the top 10 spots in the survey, which also included predominately White schools. Researchers ranked the numbers of Black doctoral graduates per 1,000 bachelor's degrees awarded the previous nine years in an effort to examine the role of Black colleges in fostering opportunities for their students.
Spelman’s accolade is not surprising considering the plethora of opportunities available to its students, including participation in the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program, an effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to encourage students in underrepresented groups — such as women and African-Americans — in the sciences; the NASA-funded Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program; and a dual-degree program with the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology, which allows students to earn a science degree from Spelman and an engineering degree from Georgia Tech simultaneously. Those programs, paired with an ever-expanding science and math curriculum (the number of chemistry professors alone has grown from four to 13 since 1981) and a state-of-the-art 100,000-square-foot science center, which opened in 2000, have helped catapult the college – founded in 1881 to train Black teachers – into a top producer of female scientists.
