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Spring Forward
A
Message from the Editor, Victoria L. Valentine...
Spring is upon us and commencement time is here.Big names and personalities
will fan out across the nation to address students during this time of transition.
Martin Luther
King III will speak to seniors at Cornell University. Brown University President
Ruth
Simmons will address graduates at Morehouse College. Spike Lee will be at Kean
University.
Colin Powell at Marymount University. NAACP President and CEO Bruce Gordon will
speak
at Gettysburg College, his alma mater.
They will speak of the future and the opportunities that await graduates and perhaps
note, as
President Bush emphasized at Oklahoma State University’s commencement, that this
“generation
will face unprecedented choices because of technology.”
Over the past decade, advances in technology have profoundly changed the way most
of us
live our lives, made us more efficient and led to medical breakthroughs. As a result,
the job
market is changing. According to the National Science Foundation, science and engineering
careers in the United States will grow by 26 percent in the next decade. By 2012,
we will have
1.25 million more positions in these fields.
And, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they will pay
well. Twenty of the 25 occupations the government agency lists as
having the highest median annual earnings —including anesthesiologist,
computer and information system manager, flight engineer and
physicist — are in science, technology, engineering or medicine.
But who will fill these lucrative jobs?
According to the National Science Foundation, African
Americans represented only 6.9 percent of those employed in science
and technology occupations in 2000. Although that was up from 2.6
percent two decades earlier, the rate is still far below the proportion
of Blacks in the population. The key to turning this situation around is
through the education pipeline.
TA report from the Government Accountability Office, “Higher
Education: Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Programs and
Related
Trends,” shows promising findings for minority students. The number of African
American
students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields increased 69
percent
between the 1995-96 and 2003-04 academic years. This increase, however, is mostly
due to
increases at the bachelor’s and master’s degree levels.
The number of African Americans pursuing doctorate degrees in the STEM disciplines
still
barely registers. In 2004, Whites earned 42 percent of doctorates in the physical
sciences;
Blacks earned just 1.5 percent, according to a study by the National Opinion Research
Center
at the University of Chicago. In the life sciences, Whites earned 53 percent of
doctoral
degrees, compared to 3.1 percent for Blacks.
In this issue we highlight a number of African Americans who have successfully
navigated
the challenges of pursuing an education and career in the STEM disciplines. We
talk with
Shirley Ann Jackson, who has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and is the president
of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., the oldest technical university in the nation.
In addition, we
profile leaders breaking ground in a variety of STEM fields.
My hope is that one day soon, these visionaries — including Stanford University
mathematician
Jonathan Farley, who appears on our cover; Ayanna Howard, a Georgia Tech robotics
engineer; and Mark Dean, who played an integral role in the evolution of the personal
computer
— will be as familiar and inspiring to our youth as a Spike Lee or Colin Powell.
Letters
to the editor may be sent to
The Crisis
7600 Georgia Avenue, NW
Suite 405
Washington, DC 20012 or
thecrisiseditorial@naacpnet.org
* Letters may be edited for length or clarity.
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