Calculus and Community: A History of the Emerging Scholars Program

mathematical concepts in ways that will help them succeed in more advanced mathematics later in their school careers. Project SEED employs and trains engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to teach its curriculum in the schools in carefully prescribed ways. (Socratic discussion techniques are used heavily in the classroom.) While Project SEED has been developed for in-school use, there appears to be no technical reason why a similar program could not be delivered via a supplementary education system. 26 • Reaching the Top If underrepresented minorities are able to eventually reach parity among high-achieving students, a much more extensive set of supplementary education institutions and programs may be necessary. Promoting High Minority Achievement in Higher Education Since the 1960s, minority progress in higher education has been measured primarily by whether or not enrollment, retention, and graduation rates have increased. Doing so has been absolutely essential, as African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans have continued to lag behind the White majority in all three areas. Much less attention, however, has been given to underrepresented minority students’ academic achievement in college, beyond the question of whether their grade-point averages (GPAs) are good enough to graduate. Few historically White colleges and universities have paid close attention to whether a significant number of underrepresented minority students are among their top graduates each year, or whether the minority students who are among the best-prepared members of each freshman class go on to enjoy the same level of academic success as their majority peers. This lack of attention to academic achievement has been costly. As noted earlier in this report, there is extensive evidence that underrepresented minority students generally do not earn grades at historically White colleges and universities that are as high as White and Asian students with similar entering academic credentials (such as admission test scores). This pattern has been found at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. On several campuses over the years, this pattern also has been found for academically well-prepared minority students, including individuals from high SES families. In their recent book, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, William Bowen and Derek Bok provide extensive confirmation of this pattern. In their study, African-American students at 28 selective colleges and universities graduated with significantly lower GPAs, on average, than their White counterparts with similar SAT I scores. Among these African Americans were many students who were well-prepared academically for selective institutions and who were from middle and high SES families. The Hispanic students in the study also had lower GPAs than White students with similar scores. One very negative consequence of this pattern is that fewer underrepresented minority students are reaching the highest levels of academic performance in college than would otherwise be the case, even as they remain heavily underrepresented in the pool of top college-bound high school seniors. Although this problem has not been the focus of the higher education community, a number of individuals and institutions have developed programs over the years that address it either directly or indirectly. A high percentage of these programs have been designed for students majoring in engineering, science, and mathematics, reflecting the interests of many government agencies and corporations that have often provided financial support for them. For example, the staff of the Professional Development Program of the University at California at Berkeley created a strategy in the 1970s that enables promising underrepresented minority students to perform very well in freshman calculus. The Meyerhoff Scholars Program, founded at the University of Promoting High Minority Achievement in Higher Education • 27