According to recent reports, mentoring is integral to increasing the share of under-represented minorities in the science pipeline. Both the federal government and private foundations have put millions of dollars into training and mentoring programs for under-represented minorities with little information about whether these programs have paid off in terms of increasing retention and productivity in the scientific workforce. Although mentoring has become a norm of graduate training, its current conceptualization is limited. Mentoring is usually thought of as a dyadic relationship between mentor and mentee rather than a dynamic and complex networked system with patterns of linkages. The American Sociological Association?s 35 year-old Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) attempts to create such networks. The purpose of this exploratory study is to compare outcomes in terms of career trajectories, scientific productivity, transformative scholarships, and disciplinary service of members of MFP networks with outcomes of other groups. This project is exploratory because the principal investigators need to determine whether enough data on the MFP Fellows, as well as the other comparison groups, can be obtained at an acceptable cost, and whether these data can be used in a comparative study of mentoring, collaboration, and productivity networks.
If successful, this exploratory study should have three outcomes. First, it can provide a model for studying the structure and efficacy of mentoring networks in other STEM disciplines. Second, its findings can be used to recommend changes that can increase the effectiveness of scientific mentoring programs for under-represented minorities. An additional contribution is to develop and apply new approaches to measuring mentoring in order to improve our ability to describe and analyze the ties and linkages among minority sociologists. When completed, this comparative study can tell us the value added by MFP mentoring networks.
With an increasing emphasis on diversity in higher education, many faculty, students, and administrators agree that post-secondary institutions should encourage the success of under-represented minority (URM) students through the career pipeline into academic careers that are considered to be archetypal or "ideal." This quasi-experimental study investigates the factors that encourage URM doctoral recipients to have successful academic careers. We compare alumni of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) 40+-year-old pre-doctoral Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) with three other groups—1) recipients of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Sociology Dissertation Improvement Grants, 2) a sample of mainly white sociologists who had not received the NSF or MFP awards, and later 3) the larger universe of URM sociologists. All of these individuals received their PhDs between 1996 and 2010. Given ASA’s significant investment over time in MFP, we are particularly interested in examining the role of this intervention program in URM career success. Specifically, we investigate whether: 1. MFP Fellows, as compared to the other groups, achieve what is regarded as the archetypal or "ideal" career by the graduate programs that socialize them, or are more likely to have "alternative" careers; 2. MFP Fellows, compared to the other three groups, are more likely to expand disciplinary knowledge in the subarea of race and ethnicity; and. 3. MFP dissertation advisors as graduate school mentors have a significant impact on MFP Fellows’ careers as compared to the other three groups. The study results are based on a longitudinal database of unobtrusive information collected about the four study groups from membership and program data, online (Google) searches, ProQuest, individual CVs, and other electronic data sources. Our measure of an "ideal" post-PhD career is whether or not individuals obtain employment and later, tenure within eight years, at a research-extensive (Research I) university, whether they publish in top disciplinary journals, whether they receive outside grants, and whether or not they assume disciplinary leadership. Bivariate and multivariate analyses are employed to determine if participants in MFP were less likely to have "ideal" careers than the three comparison groups. A variety of predictors were examined to help explain career success by this definition. A primary predictor was mentoring in graduate school. Other important predictors included earning the PhD from a Research I institution, publications and grants while in graduate school, the race/ethnicity and gender of the dissertation advisor, as well as their own race/ethnicity, gender, and participation in MFP. We found the following: Although MFPs were less likely to have "ideal" careers compared to all three groups, they were more likely to contribute to scholarship about race, class, and gender stratification, and minority health. They were significantly more likely to teach at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and other minority-serving institutions compared to the other three groups (the NSF awardees were the least likely to do so). MFP Fellows’ chances of obtaining a faculty position at a Research I institution increased significantly when they had a white male mentor. Our interpretation is that white male mentors are more likely to have contacts and networks at this type of institution. They were less likely to publish in the top three disciplinary journals than NSF awardees, but appeared to be equally likely to do so when compared to the other two groups. They were more likely to obtain tenure in eight years than the NSF awardees (possibly because they tend to hold fewer post-docs). They were significantly more likely to be officers of ASA special interest sections (organized groups that represent leadership and visibility). Although the largest proportion of women is in the MFP group, there were greater disparities between the career success of men and women in this group. Our findings should help higher education administrators as well as faculty members and diversity officers learn more about URM career trajectories and what contributes to success in climbing academic career ladders, including the impact of intervention programs. The findings suggest that overall MFP helps to level the playing field for URM scholars, helps them contribute to the scholarly literature on race/ethnicity and gender, and results in greater service to minority-serving institutions. Especially important is the impact of white male mentors. However, there were some findings that suggest that intervention programs may not always be as helpful as intended. Our newly awarded NSF grant, titled the "Science of Broadening Participation: Stratification in Academic Career Trajectories," will help explore this further. These findings should be of use across the sciences, humanities, and applied disciplines. The findings should help a wide variety of other disciplines set up, administer, and evaluate successful intervention programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-PhD levels. They should also be of use to students at all levels (and their parents) as they try to plan their career trajectories, both inside and outside of the academy.
