Black students are severely underrepresented in Florida SUS undergraduate physics programs. Whose responsibility is it to solve that problem?

During the 2017-18 academic year, 182 students in Florida’s State University System graduated with bachelors’ degrees in physics.

Only four of those students were Black, according to the IPEDS database.

Physics is one of the STEM fields that the 2015 Georgetown University report “Economic Value of College Majors” says is in the top 25 college majors ranked by salary for workers aged 25-59. The others are engineering, computer science and mathematics. So the severe underrepresentation of Black students in our undergraduate physics programs matters for reasons of economic opportunity.

Furthermore, if we are not educating Black bachelor’s degree graduates in physics, then we are not preparing Black students for Ph.D.’s in physics, and there are few Black candidates available to recruit to our college and university physics departments. And that makes it tougher to recruit Black physics undergraduates in the future.

Of course, Physics isn’t the only field among Georgetown’s Top 25 struggling with the underrepresentation of Black students at the undergraduate level. In Florida, 21.6% of the students in public K-12 schools are Black (from the Florida Department of Education). Yet only 6.3% of bachelor’s degree graduates in engineering were Black during the 2017-18 academic year (the latest year for which data were available in IPEDS). The corresponding numbers for computing and mathematics/statistics were 9.3% and 7.7%, respectively.

Of course, in Physics only 2.2% of the 2017-18 bachelor’s degree graduates were Black. Since that represents only four Black graduates, that number is subject to a lot of variation (Poisson statistics, right?). But still.

The problem doesn’t originate at the college level, of course. In May of 2019, 3,246 Florida high school students passed the exam for the Advanced Placement Physics 1 course. Of those, only 75 (2.3%) were Black. The percentages for AP Physics 2 (2.6%), AP Physics C Mechanics (2.3%) and AP Physics C Electricity and Magnetism (2.1%) were similar. (From the AP Program Participation and Performance page at the College Board)

The statistics on the underrepresentation of Black students in Florida’s AP Physics courses prompted several of my university-level physics colleagues to tell me that the problem exists before students arrive at college so that it’s not their responsibility to fix it. But if I and my colleagues aren’t going to solve the problem (or at least try to do so), who will?

For whatever reason, Florida’s K-12 schools have been unable to solve the problem of the underrepresentation of Black students in their own physics classes. With the arrival of the COVID era in which savage budget cuts will propagate through the state’s education budgets, the high schools’ ability to address the problem on their own will all but evaporate.

If you are skeptical about this prediction, find a recording of last week’s press conference in which Governor DeSantis and Education Commissioner Corcoran announced their plans for reopening K-12 schools this fall. They emphasized reading and civics. In fact, those were the only academic subjects they mentioned (if I have this wrong, let me know). When they talked about “closing achievement gaps”, they were talking about the basic-level reading assessed by the state’s standardized tests. They were certainly not talking about getting more Black students into high school physics and calculus courses. Those subjects will likely disappear from course offerings in many Florida public high schools in the next few years as budgets plummet.

So if those of us on university physics faculties want to address the underrepresentation of Black students in our undergraduate physics programs, we are going to have to do it ourselves by reaching out to students at the high school level or before and somehow providing the encouragement and preparation they need to get them ready to succeed in our departments.

Does that task sound too daunting to address? Perhaps break it down and think of it this way. If you manage to work with one Black high school student and that student eventually earns a bachelor’s degree in Physics, that one student would have accounted for an increase of 25% in the number of Florida’s SUS Physics bachelor’s degree graduates during the 2017-18 academic year. That’s as high impact as anything we do (your research isn’t any more important than that).

Three of the SUS Physics Departments – those at FSU, UCF and USF – participate in the American Physical Society’s Bridge Program that recruits Black and Latinx students into Physics Ph.D. programs. It is a one-student-at-a-time operation. Given that there are generally only about a dozen Black Ph.D. graduates in Physics nationally each year, graduating one Black student with a Ph.D. is a high-impact achievement. The Physics faculty at FSU, UCF and USF have been willing to take that task on at the Ph.D. level.

Will those three Physics departments, and those at the other SUS institutions, be willing to make a similar commitment at the undergraduate level? It’s time to find out.