Invisible Student Scientists : How Graduate School Science and Engineering Programs Shortchange Black, Hispanic, and Women Students

Fisher asserts that more native-born women and underrepresented minorities need to obtain advanced degrees in the United States. Drawing on rich data from a sample of approximately 1,300 graduate students, Fisher shows how misguided graduate school policies and practices have discouraged women and minorities from seeking degrees in the sciences.

In this book, Robert Leslie Fisher contends that thanks to misguided university and government policies, we have created a science elite that does not represent the demographics of the nation. We need to recruit more native-born women and underrepresented minorities into graduate programs in order to maintain our nation’s prosperity and military strength. Fisher draws on sample data from 1300 male and female respondents from White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian students. He shows how the student culture of graduate schools in science and engineering sees women, Black, and Hispanic students as outsiders and deprives these budding scientists and research engineers of the collaborators they need to succeed in their careers. Fisher argues that we must inspire female, Black, and Hispanic graduate students to believe they can succeed in their careers by (1) changing the student culture in graduate schools’ science and engineering programs to be more inclusive, (2) removing burdensome undergraduate educational duties from graduate students so that they can concentrate on mastering the difficult subject matter of their disciplines, and (3) hiring more women and under-represented minorities as faculty to serve as role models.