- Mentoring and professionalizing experiences, such as lab work and teaching, to ensure success for minorities entering the various fields;
- Consideration of race and need together in crafting support programs;
- More active leadership at the federal level.
None of these recommendations provides the kind of short-term fix that seems to appeal in this age of sound bites. And that’s intentional, notes Weisbuch.
Graduate education is itself slow — it takes seven to 10 years to produce a Ph.D. cohort. And to ensure that there is “a healthy cohort of students of color who are interested in graduate education, you have to get to them when they’re between eight and 12-years-old,” Weisbuch says. Thus, in order to have any realistic chance of success, the recommendations must look to the long term.
But that doesn’t change Weisbuch’s impatience as he looks at the data: “We’re in a race against social injustice and the anger that comes out of that. We’re also in a global race, in which we in the United States need to be able to use the full human resources available to us to remain competitive. Slow progress is not enough. We need to achieve a takeoff.”
The report is available at <www.woodrow.org/newsroom/releases/news_releases.html>.
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