Steve Russell: Little progress for Native Americans getting PhDs

African-Americans have increased their Ph.D.s 87 percent in the past 20 years, which sounds great until you see they are now getting 6.3 percent of the degrees awarded, 2,079, while representing 13.1 percent of the US population.

Hispanics have doubled their numbers of Ph.D.s in the past 20 years, which sounds all right until you see they are now getting 6.5 percent of the degrees awarded, 2,141, while representing 16.9 percent of the U.S. population.

Then came the sentence in the report that told me what I didn’t want to hear: “The number of American Indian or Alaska Native doctorate recipients fell to its lowest point of the past 20 years.” In numbers, that’s 102 doctorates or well under one-half of one percent awarded to a group representing (allegedly) 1.2 percent of the population.

I confess this hurt more back when I was in the business of producing Ph.D.s, because it felt like a personal failure to look under every rock for potential Indian candidates. But it still hurts enough that I take on the job of convincing others that this is bad news to hear that while other minorities are making too little progress, we are making none.