Declining Number of Blacks Seen in Math in Science

 Smith, 27, received a fellowship for black scientists this year from Merck and the United Negro College Fund. As he works toward his PhD, Smith lives on a salary and stipend of about $25,000 per year. Like many black students, Smith comes from modest means. His mother was a homemaker with a high school diploma; his father earned a GED, became an electrician and eventually owned a business.

“I get paid to go to school, so I don’t want to complain,” Smith says.

But he’s still several years away from completing his PhD, and he’s tired of agonizing over a $37 bus ticket. Even after he gets that degree, he’ll need to do a year of post-doctoral study. “If I stay here at Hopkins” for post-doc work, he says, “I’ll make the same or less than a city sanitation worker.”

At each stage of science education, many black students feel pressure to stop studying and start earning real money. Smith, who has an undergraduate degree from MIT, says he could be making as much as $115,000 per year in a corporate job.Yet it’s hard to advance far in science without at least a master’s, if not a doctorate.

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