Untapped Talent: The African American Presence in Physics & The Geosciences

by Roman Czujko, Rachel Ivie and James Stith

Highlights

African Americans are under-represented among college graduates relative to their proportion among the college-age population. Still, more than 120,000 African Americans earn bachelor's degrees each year, and their representation differs dramatically by field of degree. Among the sciences, geosciences and in physics have the lowest representation of African Americans (Table 1).

Each year about 160 African Americans earn physics bachelors, but only 65 earn geoscience bachelors (Table 5). Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) produce a large proportion of African American bachelors in science, math and engineering.

Almost all physics and geoscience departments have thus far played virtually no role in the education of African Americans (Table 2).

Fifty-seven percent of all bachelor's degrees are earned by women. Among African American college students, women play an ever bigger role, earning about 65% of all bachelor's degrees (Table 9).

Remarkably few African Americans have earned PhDs in physics or the geosciences over the last three decades, but the number is increasing (Figure 4 and Figure 5).

There are fewer than 200 African American physics faculty members in almost 800 departments (Table 17).