Dramatic Drops for Minorities

By Ezra Bowen.

Earlier this year, Richard Berendzen, president of the American University in Washington, ran ads in educational journals for two deanships, one in arts and sciences, the other in the law school. Hundreds of responses poured in, but not a single one, Berendzen noted, was from a black applicant. At about the same time, Patricia Snyder, 42, faced the bleak prospect of having to abandon her graduate studies in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) because she could not meet her annual tuition and off-campus living expenses of $16,000. If she had left, the department's black graduate- student body would have been reduced by one-third. Indeed, only 5.2% of UCLA's 11,610 graduate students are black.

Berendzen never did find a black candidate; Snyder found a way to hang in with her anthropology studies. But both cases symbolize a chilling reality: at universities across the nation, blacks in particular and minorities in general are shockingly underrepresented at all levels, from the top of the faculty down to the lowliest freshman. The most dramatic drop-offs occur at the upper levels. Minorities constitute more than 20% of the nation's college-age population, but according to Sheila Biddle, program officer of the Ford Foundation, they accounted for only 8% of the 31,190 Ph.D.s awarded in 1983. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and American Indians together accounted for a bare 4.4%. At the M.A. level, blacks, who make up 13% of the college-age population, were awarded 6.5% of the degrees in 1979 and 5.8% in 1981. Educators say the statistics show few signs of improvement and in many cases have been getting worse.

Despite these dismal figures, Clifton Wharton Jr., chancellor of the / sprawling State University of New York (SUNY), remained skeptical when his faculty complained that good nonwhite teachers were difficult to find. Then he discovered that of some 1,000 Ph.D.s earned by blacks, more than 600 were in education but only 29 were in the physical sciences, six in math and one in computer science. Given such sparse credentials, faculty jobs for blacks have been extremely hard to come by. At Stanford, for example, a mere 45 of the university's 1,294 faculty members are black or Hispanic. Among minorities, only Asians appear to be strengthening their grip on education's top tiers. At SUNY in 1984, Asians held 531 faculty posts, compared with 316 for blacks. For the current academic year, Asians took all but eight of 68 new job openings.

The situation was brought into fresh focus last month when the New England Journal of Medicine reported significant falloffs in minority medical-school attendance since the civil rights fervor of a decade ago. In 1974 minority enrollment peaked at 10%, with blacks hitting a high of 7.5%. By 1983 minorities had slipped to 9.7%, blacks to 6.8%. A similar situation exists in some law schools.

One reason for the decline is money. About half of college-bound Hispanics and blacks come from families with annual incomes of $12,000 or less. The tab for a four-year medical degree can now run up to $100,000 and for a three-year law degree up to $50,000. And student aid is drying up, both from the Federal Government and from many foundations. With less help in sight, undergraduate enrollments are also showing a decline. Combined Hispanic and black college attendance fell from 34.6% of high schoolers in 1976 to 29.2% in 1983. In addition, many minority students arrive poorly prepared by understaffed urban ghetto and rural secondary schools.

Finally and perhaps most fundamentally, there is a very real but hard to quantify diminution of citizen interest across the nation in adhering to fairpractice goals. "It's discouraging," sums up Director Louis Sullivan of Morehouse School of Medicine. "We have lost the legacy of the '60s and '70s in equal opportunity and in equity."

With reporting by Patricia Delaney/Washington, with other bureaus