Years ago, having a Ph.D. conferred a special status, a sign that the “Dr.” had reached a pinnacle of educational achievement. Today, not only has the status of the Ph.D. slipped, but a well-documented glut of such degrees has seen more than a few doctors of history or medieval studies taking orders in restaurants rather than watching students take notes in a classroom.
For the most part, though, the fact is that the majority of Ph.D.-holders are white. In a development just now emerging in the academic and business worlds, officials are realizing that far from being overstocked, there is a severe shortage of minorities with doctorate degrees.
And the ripple effects are twofold: not enough minority professors, particularly in business, to mentor other minorities; and, by extension, not enough minorities going into corporate careers.
Now there is a movement under way to address the problem. At a recent conference in Chicago, business and academic officials from around the country were courting African-Americans and other minorities with an unusual proposition:
Go back to academia, get a Ph.D., and we’ll pay your way. Even when the Ph.D.s stay on campus to teach as professors, rather than return to their previous jobs, proponents of the movement hope the doctors will be able to help other minority students pursue careers in business.
The straightforward name of the program is the PHD Project, and it is co-sponsored by the KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation and the Graduate Management Admission Council. It is specifically aimed at diversifying the faculties of the nation’s business schools.
Ursula Alvarado, 31, a Hispanic doctoral student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, is one of the students who answered the call three years ago, making her one of about a half dozen minorities out of 80 Ph.D. candidates in the management school.
She left a well-paying job at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati–not an easy decision for her or many others who join the program–and has been met by incredulity from friends and family ever since.
On some nights when the light in Alvarado’s small office at Northwestern burns past 3 a.m., she wonders whether corporate America wasn’t a cakewalk after all. But what brought Alvarado out of the corporate world and into academia was a need to have an impact on students, particularly minorities, as a teacher. She had achieved some measure of success in the business world, but at times, she still felt empty.
“Working as a professor, I will have maybe 300 students in front of me that I can help and have an impact on,” Alvarado said. “It is just a level of satisfaction I couldn’t find doing anything else.”
Until recently, very few minorities saw going through years of graduate education as a viable option. Lack of money, lack of role models, family obligations or the need to earn money soon after college kept all but a few minorities from pursuing careers in academia.
The PHD Project, by supplying information about the application process and giving students access to tuition waivers, fellowships, grants and scholarships, aims to break down some of the barriers.
At its most recent convention in November, at the Chicago Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel, some 450 business executives were invited out of an applicant pool of about 1,150 minorities to collect information and meet with representatives from 75 of the nation’s top universities.
So far, the program has recruited some 232 minority candidates for business Ph.D. programs.
Although there still are only a meager number of minorities entering business doctoral programs, minority students overall are getting doctorate degrees in higher numbers–due, many experts say, to programs like the PHD Project. Black Americans received 1,315 doctorates last year, up from 1,309 in 1995; American Indians, 186, up from 149; Mexican-Americans and Hispanics, 699, up from 650.
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These numbers are rebounding from the Reagan years, when sources of funding for education started drying up and as a result the number of minorities pursuing advanced degrees dropped dramatically, said Harold Lundy, executive director for The Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs in Overland Park, Kan. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1971, crediting the achievement to a program for minorities called the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management.
“These young people do not come from families where they have the resources for graduate studies,” Lundy said. “It is a choice of taking a job or not having any money. The corporations are picking up where colleges and the federal government dropped off.”
“We saw the data, the absence of minority faculty, and we decided to attack it,” said Bernard J. Milano, director of The PHD Project and executive director of the KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation. “We were determined that diversity was important for us as an institution. Our firm believes in it.”
“I don’t think they are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts,” added Karin Chenoweth, the editor of the Fairfax, Va.-based magazine Black Issues in Higher Education. “Corporations realize they need a diverse work force and not to fulfill a sense of fairness, but because their markets demand it and their customers demand to deal with people who feel comfortable with a wide variety of businesses.”
Though corporations have their own reasons for supporting the program, there also are many reasons professionals find the program attractive. Teaching offers more flexibility and stability, according to some faculty members and recent professionals who have made the leap. There are teaching opportunities in all regions of the country; there are no mergers and very little downsizing; and professors have more independence over their work than those people in the business world.
“You decide what you want to think about,” said Melvin T. Stith, the dean of the college of business at Florida State University. “In corporate America, you are told what to think about.”
Angela Brown, a 34-year-old internal consultant for the Prudential Life Insurance Co. in New Jersey, is one of the professionals contemplating a career change because she wants to teach and mentor others. Brown, a graduate of Howard University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, believes she can make more of a contribution to society on the college campus. At the conference, Brown said she was overwhelmed because she met so many successful corporate executives who feel the way she does.
“It was just amazing to me that so many were interested in continuing their education and bettering themselves,” she said. “But the impetus is not for the money, but seeing how they can contribute.”
And the money is not bad, Milano and Stith stressed. Some of the professionals could earn six-figure salaries teaching, and that does not include additional money for consulting during time off in the summer.
But while they applaud the effort of The PHD Project, some business experts still question the necessity for minorities to pursue a doctorate degree.
“I think that (earning a Ph.D.) is something that is overkill,” said Robert Calvin, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, where 16 of the school’s 115 faculty members are minorities and 10 of the 104 Ph.D. students are minorities. “Something that would be more productive is for corporations to think about taking another first step, providing financial assistance for MBAs.”
Calvin said money prevents many of his minority students from getting their master’s of business administration degrees and other advanced degrees. Many hold down jobs while they are pursuing a degree.
Still, Patricia G. Martinez, who attended November’s conference and is scheduled to receive her doctorate in 1999 from the University of California-Irvine, said she was excited when she saw her name recently in black and white in the student schedule catalog.
“I felt like, `OK, kiddo, you are hitting the big time,’ ” she said. ” `This is what you have been working toward. You are there.’ “