Calling Black Engineering Ph.D.’s, Your Country Needs You!

Our country's ability to lead the next technical revolution requires that we find more black students for engineering graduate school.

The Internet has made it easier for American companies to target consumers worldwide. But with that expanded reach comes the necessity to design products for a more diverse consumer.

It’s a challenging task, especially for companies with traditional engineering workforces. And frankly, sometimes the results are not just poor but embarrassing. Not long ago, Google experienced one such diversity-linked failure that took a toll on its public image. While using artificial intelligence to build a facial recognition system, Google trained its computers to recognize skin tones according to the Fitzpatrick Scale developed in 1975 for work on skin cancer patients. When Google debuted its facial recognition system, the public was not amused. The system famously misclassified black faces as gorillas! No one knew why. Then it was discovered that the Fitzpatrick Scale excluded the majority of black skin tones because they are not as susceptible to skin cancer. In effect, no one had trained Google’s computers to recognize dark faces. Guess who fixed it? A black scientist, Dr. Ellis Monk, developed a new skin tone scale with more levels to represent the darker skin tones better. Google adopted it, and today its facial recognition system works on black and white faces. The realization that black engineers understand better how to design for black and brown communities seems like a no-brainer. But only in the last decade has this fact led tech giants like Apple and manufacturers like Boeing to see increasing their number of underrepresented engineering PhDs as important. Engineering graduate schools have heard the call and are finally ramping up their recruiting offices. But, unlike companies that have had some success finding minority engineers with bachelor’s degrees, colleges are having a heck of a time recruiting black engineers into their graduate ranks. One problem is that graduate engineering recruiters don’t know to which black undergraduates to market their programs. The last significant study by NSF reported that in 2016 predominantly white institutions (PWIs) like Stanford and MIT awarded five times more bachelor’s degrees to black engineering students than historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University. If black bachelor’s degree holders from PWIs were just as likely as those from HBCUs to continue to graduate school, one would expect to find that five times more black PhDs would have received their BS degrees from a PWI. Surprisingly, a 2017 study found that 26% of black PhDs in science and engineering had an HBCU baccalaureate origin. Therefore, of the 1,405 black PhDs awarded in science and engineering each year, 365 got their bachelor’s degrees from an HBCU and 1,040 from a PWI. This ratio is 1:2.8, not nearly the 1:5 expected! Put another way, black students earning a BS in engineering from an HBCU are nearly twice as likely as those from a PWI to enter an engineering Ph.D. program. Some researchers believe the disparity is partly due to the self-confidence undergraduates gain at HBCUs. These data show that HBCUs educate the vast majority of black engineers interested in continuing their education into graduate school. To supply the diverse engineering PhDs that corporate America needs to remain relevant in a global marketplace, graduate schools must focus their recruiting aim on those black undergraduates finishing at HBCUs. The results may prevent damaging impacts on a company’s image and even guarantee America’s next technical revolution.