RIT is participating in a national project to increase the number of women and minorities enrolled in graduate physics programs.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, ethnic and racial minorities earned only 7 percent of the physics doctoral degrees that were conferred between 2012 and 2014. Nineteen percent of the graduates were women.
"Physics trains people to be problem solvers and bring unique problem solving capabilities to the table,” said Casey Miller, an associate professor in RIT's school of chemistry and materials science. “And the outcomes have been shown in lots of different research that a diverse group of problem solvers arrives at better conclusions consistently than a more homogenous group."
Miller is contributing to an effort to create a national network for access and inclusion in physics graduate education.
He and his colleagues will conduct faculty training workshops at six large state and Ivy League universities in a two-year pilot project starting this fall. This will include new selection protocols for evaluating applicants to graduate programs, and finding alternatives to GRE scores.
Miller says these test scores vary widely among different groups of people.
"But when students get into graduate school, outcomes are not different,” he said. “Women complete PhDs at the same rate and in the same amount of time, and they have the same grade point averages. But that one item at the admissions stage causes filtering of women and minorities just to get admitted to PhD programs."
Programs that take a holistic approach to admissions and humanize the students have good results, according to Miller. “Programs that do that kind of stuff have very impressive retention rates of their PhDs, on the order of 90 percent, whereas the average retention rate for Physics (programs), according to the Council of Graduate Schools, is about 50 percent.”
Admissions counselors taking part in the pilot program will be encouraged to look for students with non-cognitive skills such as grit and perseverance. Miller says these traits aren’t really measured in the admissions phase in most STEM fields, but they are extremely critical when it comes to identifying students who will navigate the ups and downs of graduate school.
Underrepresented groups in the field of physics include women, Hispanics, African Americans, Native Americans, people with disabilities, people from rural areas and those of low socioeconomic status.
