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In 1987, only 3% of all male medical students were Black. I was lucky enough to be one of them, a fact not lost on me as I started my first year at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. I was the only Black student in the entire class.
Why was I a successful applicant?
As a high school student growing up in an underserved community on Chicago’s South Side, I had participated in the Chicago Area Health and Medical Careers Program (CAHMCP). We students affectionately christened it “CHAMPS.” It was founded at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1979 to give kids like me and others from the Chicagoland area, who had the desire and aptitude for a healthcare career, a pathway to success. Simply put, it was an early precursor to today’s STEM enrichment programs.
Today I can say with 100% certainty it worked. My career would not have been possible without the mentorship, support and friendships I gained from CHAMPS, which has morphed into the CPASS Foundation today.
My own experience is proof of the transformative power and impact of STEM enrichment programs. At my medical school I bonded with the janitors, not the future doctors in my class. When I wasn’t privy to any of my peers’ study groups, I joined one with the friends I made at CHAMPS in high school. They were Black South Siders too but enrolled at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
Just as that STEM enrichment program worked for me and many other students on Chicago’s South Side, it can work today. We have never needed such programs more; Black people are underrepresented in every STEM profession. Although Black people made up 11% of the U.S. workforce, they represented 9% of STEM workers in 2018, the last year when statistics were parsed, Pew Research reported. Among employed adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, Black people were just 7% of the STEM workforce.
Yet, STEM jobs are a bridge to upward mobility and long-term financial security. All those STEM jobs Black people don’t have, or can’t attain, are not only well-paying but among the nation’s fastest-growing occupations now and through the end of the decade, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted. In fact, STEM jobs will grow over two times faster than the total of all occupations between 2019 and 2029. Think nurse practitioners and physician assistants, data scientists and mathematicians, speech pathologists and health services managers, information security and operations research analysts — even wind turbine technicians and fire prevention specialists.
But these jobs require a bachelor’s degree or higher — at a time when Black students are earning STEM degrees at lower levels than their representation in the U.S. population. Black people made up 12.3% of the U.S. population in 2018 but only earned 8% of all STEM bachelor’s and master’s degrees and 5.5% of doctorates, Science News reported. While the general population has earned STEM bachelor's degrees at the rate of 238 per 100,000, Black people have earned bachelor’s degrees at the rate of 153 per 100,000.
Not surprisingly, given the stats, Black people are significantly underrepresented in those well-paying STEM careers. For every 100,000 employed STEM professionals in 2017, the last year the numbers were parsed, 2,472 were Black while 5,131 were white.
Even as colleges pledge to improve, the share of engineering and math graduates who are Black is declining, the Hechinger Report noted last month. Clearly the solution is to close the Black achievement gap in STEM education.
Doing so is easier said than done. Despite the enormous attention devoted to this effort in the U.S. education system in the past decade, Black students remain roughly two years behind average white students, McKinsey noted. And thanks to the events of the past year, we have much more work to do given the educational gaps homeschooling has inflicted on underserved children.
Clearly, building a talent pipeline of minority children who can — and will — pursue STEM careers is a critical goal right now. And that’s where STEM enrichment programs like CPASS come in. These programs offer them exposure to careers they may have not known about, and knowledge and access to early training programs that can increase their chances for success.
But to really nurture the talent of the future and build a healthy pipeline, STEM education for underserved children must begin much earlier and be far more inclusive. Research has shown that young children can benefit from STEM education even before their first birthdays, and especially as preschoolers. Beginning science education at the pre-kindergarten level has profound positive effects on later aptitude, a Brookings Institution study noted. Most significantly, the study also shows that these positive impacts are even greater for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Undeniably, STEM education has a transformative impact on children’s lives. STEM concepts help children develop new ways of thinking. It encourages curiosity, hones their analytical skills and improves literacy, language learning and executive function.
Another interesting point that struck home for me is that student’s commitment to STEM may solidify in high school rather than in college, research from Cornell University suggests. For me, attending CHAMPS while I was in high school gave me the confidence to aim for a career in medicine. And that’s where STEM enrichment programs like CPASS come in.
But finding STEM enrichment programs that are age-appropriate and accessible — especially for underserved families — is often easier said than done. In Illinois, CPASS discovered that most minority families are unaware of STEM programs in their communities. Consequently, one of the most important offerings at CPASS has been a comprehensive online searchable database of all STEM programs in Chicagoland and statewide.
And a true blessing for CPASS has been an innovative partnership with SMASH Academy that allows us to bring an intensive, three-year-long, college prep STEM enrichment program to the areas of Illinois where it’s needed most. Instead of partnering with a specific university as it has in other locales, SMASH designated CPASS as its statewide anchor. This has enabled us to partner with universities in different geographic areas to bring transformative STEM programs to a wider range of Black and brown students.
Hopefully, organizations in other states will organize similar efforts because children who learn STEM concepts throughout their lives are far better prepared to meet the increasingly STEM-focused professional requirements they will face as adults. We must all find ways to offer underserved Black children age-appropriate, accessible and above all engaging opportunities to learn STEM concepts early and often.
