Testimony to the Committee on Education of the Boston City Council
December 19, 2014
I am pleased to present testimony to your Committee on diversity in higher education, specifically as it pertains to Boston University and its relationship with the City of Boston.
I want to begin by saying how important the issue of diversity is to me. I grew up the child of a single mother who worked as an hourly employee and who raised me in a multiracial, inner-city neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas. I attended the San Antonio public schools. My mother’s work ethic and my early experience in this multicultural setting shaped my values. For me, the socioeconomic escalator that leads to the American dream is accessed by quality education. Ensuring that every child and young adult has this access to quality education is essential if we are to fulfill the promise of our society.
I have spent the last twenty years of my career in leadership roles in higher education and have made diversity a consistent priority. Today I will speak about the successes and challenges for Boston University at achieving diversity that reflects the rich and changing diversity of our country and ensures that students and scholars from all backgrounds can realize their full potential.
Our blueprint for enhancing diversity and inclusion of the faculty at Boston University is the document published in 2008, Excellence Through Diversity, which is the report of a special task force that I organized shortly after becoming President of Boston University. I asked this group to explore how we could enhance both the racial and gender diversity on our campus. The task force report focused largely on faculty-related issues, as well as leadership and governance. We have implemented essentially all of the recommendations of this report. I will not go through these in detail, but I am happy to send a summary of these actions to the Committee.
Increasing the diversity of our student body, especially the undergraduates, has figured prominently in planning led by my office and the Board of Trustees. I will refer to these efforts later in my testimony. I believe that if diversity is a core value of the institution, it must be embraced by the entire leadership team, with accountability built into assessment processes. Our goal has been to establish a culture of shared accountability for diversity throughout the Boston University administration.
As you know, we submitted testimony for your hearing on October 24, when both Boston University and Northeastern University were invited to testify on this subject; I understand that we are the only institution that responded. Our testimony is available on my website at Boston University and I will not repeat here all of the information available in that testimony.
Today, Boston University is proud of its diverse, global campus community—a vibrant intellectual hub with students and faculty from every ethnicity and sexual orientation and more than 140 countries around the world. The University has implemented a broad set of initiatives to promote diversity at every level of our campus. The mission of fostering diversity is clearly articulated in our Diversity Statement, which has been ratified by our faculty governance entities and our Board of Trustees. We are committed to building a university that is open and inclusive and fulfills the promise of access and opportunity.
I would like to talk specifically about student and faculty diversity at Boston University.
In selecting the Class of 2018, achieving diversity was (as it will continue to be for future classes) a top priority for Boston University Admissions:
- 32% of its members are minority students, including 16.2% Asian-American, 9.8% Hispanic, and 5.3% African-American.
- 23% are international students from 72 countries—6 more countries than the previous year.
This diverse group of students made it through the University’s most competitive admissions process to date. Only 34% of the 54,200 applicants were accepted. The average GPA for this exceptionally talented class was a 3.63/4.00 GPA, up very significantly from only a decade ago. The average three-test SAT score for this group was 1946—or 1296 on a two-test basis.
I turn my attention to enrollment of students from Massachusetts and the City of Boston. The percentage of our freshman class from Massachusetts is 15%, or 598 of the 3,915 matriculated students. Although students from the Commonwealth make up the largest contingent in our incoming class, New York and California—at 12% and 10% respectively—are almost equally large.
It is interesting to consider the history of minority enrollment at Boston University. We have monitored the composition of our student body since the early 1970s. It is interesting to note that the percentage of incoming African-Americans was higher in the early 1970s but dropped precipitously in the middle of that decade. We have been slowly restoring the participation percentage over the last two decades. The Hispanic- and Asian-American percentages were very low in 1970 and have steadily risen to the levels in this year’s class.
We work very hard at increasing the enrollment rate of undergraduate minority students and are making slow but sure progress. Our October 24 testimony described our ongoing initiatives. I would like to draw special attention to our long-standing commitment to offer access to Boston University to graduates of the Boston Public Schools. This fall, 156 Boston Public School graduates were accepted into the Class of 2018; 77 of those BPS graduates chose to attend BU. Included in this cohort are the recipients of Boston University’s Menino and Community Service Scholarships. Let me describe each program.
Thomas M. Menino Scholarship Program
The Thomas M. Menino Scholarship Program was previously known as the Boston High School Scholarship Program and was renamed for Mayor Tom Menino in June 2013 to celebrate the late Mayor’s involvement in the program and his passion for education. The Menino Scholarship Program is the longest-running and largest scholarship program of its kind. Each year, 25 exceptional Boston Public High School seniors are awarded four-year, full-tuition merit scholarships to Boston University. Since the program’s inception in 1973, 1,921 BPS students have been awarded more than $155 million in full-tuition scholarships from Boston University.
Boston University Community Service Scholarship Program
In 2009, in an effort to further expand scholarship opportunities for local students, I committed the University to meeting the full financial need (without loans) of any Boston Public School graduate admitted to Boston University through the creation of the Community Service Scholarship. The Boston Community Service Scholars constitute the only cohort of students anywhere for which we make this uncapped, no-loan commitment of financial aid. Admission to both programs (Menino and Community Service) is based on a student’s academic achievement in high school and our assessment of the ability of the student to succeed at Boston University. The considered judgment of the admissions staff about a student’s ability to succeed is very important. It is, we have found, a grave disservice to enroll a student who is not prepared to handle the challenges of a rigorous curriculum.
Since the program’s inception in 2009, 264 Boston Public School students have received over $32 million in Community Service Scholarship funding.
In reviewing the two scholarship programs as they have run concurrently since 2009, we find that we have had great success at recruiting BPS students. We have offered admission to 810 students, with 440 students choosing to matriculate at Boston University. The yield—the percentage of students offered admissions who then enroll—is over 54%. This yield is similar to the yield at those private institutions that are in a position to meet full financial need without loans for their entire student body. The yield for these Boston-specific scholarship programs is more than double the yield for our entire freshman class, for which we presently cannot afford to make this generous, no-loan commitment.
We are particularly pleased to be able to report that the retention rate for students enrolled in these scholarship programs is 96% for the Menino Scholars and 97% for the Community Service Scholars; both exceed the University’s overall retention rate of 93%. It is important to point out that these retention results are achieved with additional mentoring and advising resources specifically dedicated to the Boston cohorts, as described in our October 24 testimony.
I want to reiterate that there is no cap on the number of Community Service Scholars. Applicants from the Boston Public Schools simply have to meet the admission qualifications of the University.
Although the diversity of the students in these scholarship programs is outstanding, it does not precisely mirror the demography of Boston. For the combined Menino and Community Service Scholars Programs during the 2009–2014 period, the diversity is as follows: 14% African-American, 48% Asian-American, 9% Hispanic-American, and 20% Caucasian-American. While this is a very diverse student cohort, this distribution should be compared to the diversity of the Boston Public Schools, in which African- American and Hispanic students constitute over 70% of the students and Asian-American students are slightly under 10%.
Clearly, one of the City’s highest priorities is for more students from the Boston Public Schools to achieve at levels that make it possible for them to earn admission to universities, such as Boston University, and then persist to graduation. Our public schools have made important progress in retention and graduation rates in recent years, but there is much more to do if all our students are going to have the opportunity to take advantage of quality higher education.
We share this priority with the City and organize an array of programs within the Boston Public Schools to help with this mission. These programs are detailed in our testimony of October 24. When coupled with the fact that Boston University makes the largest PILOT payment to Boston (over $6 million annually) of any institution at a time when some universities are backing away from such commitments, I say proudly that we are committed to the City and to the success of the students in BPS.
Faculty Diversity
Just as high school academic achievement defines the candidate pool for the four-year undergraduate program at Boston University, continued academic achievement defines the path to a faculty position at a major research university such as our institution.
Where are we today? The University’s annual Affirmative Action Plan, prepared by the Equal Opportunity Office, shows that on January 1, 2014, 15% of the entire Boston University faculty was identified as minority; this figure includes 2% African-American, 3% Hispanic, and 9% Asian-American. By comparison, 44% of our faculty members are women. We are making good progress toward gender diversity.
If we look only at full-time faculty with what we refer to as “unmodified rank”—those who will go through the full promotion and review process equivalent to our tenure process, the diversity is similar: 17% of these faculty are identified as being members of minorities, including 2% African-American, 3% Hispanic, and 12% Asian-American. The percentage of women in this cohort is slightly smaller at 37%; however, we are pleased that 51% of our assistant professors are women.
Why are the numbers so low for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans on our faculty? Can Boston University do better at hiring and retaining African- and Hispanic-American faculty members? Yes, and we are committed to doing so. But it will not be an easy path, because of the reality of the small number of available minority-identified candidates—i.e., those doctoral graduates who would be recruited for these positions. The shorthand term for this hurdle is the “pipeline challenge.”
I will illustrate this challenge from two vantage points: first, a view of the national landscape for doctoral graduates, and then an account of our specific experience using the example of a specific faculty search within the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University. For the national perspective, I use data from 2009 published in 2012 by the National Science Foundation survey of PhDs (other professional doctorate degrees are not included in this data) granted at United States institutions. Of the 61,730 degrees granted in 2009 across all fields of study included in that report, only 6% were awarded to African-American and 4% to Hispanic-American students, with the largest pools being Caucasian (51%) and international (27%) graduates. This data shows the challenge; the diversity in the candidate pool is severely limited. As a result, there is intense competition for top candidates, resulting in minority PhD-holders receiving multiple offers for faculty positions as well as frequent efforts by institutions to recruit faculty away from other institutions.
The situation for achieving gender diversity is much different, with over 40% of the doctorates awarded in 2009 being awarded to women, according to the National Science Foundation data.
That’s the big picture.
Here’s an example of our immediate experience. Last year, Boston University conducted a major search with the aim of hiring three promising neurobiologists—modern biologists who study the brain—in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences. Through a national advertising campaign we generated 419 applicants for these positions, of which 105 were women and 29 were under-represented minority applicants.
Who are these applicants? They are graduates of the top neuroscience programs from around the country and the world. They were admitted to these doctoral programs through highly competitive processes after completing highly successful undergraduate careers. Last year, for example, the neuroscience doctoral program at Boston University had 336 applicants (with 25 under-represented minority applicants) for 8 incoming positions in the doctoral program. One minority student was offered admission, but chose to go elsewhere. After taking 5–6 years to complete their doctorates, students in these demanding programs go on to post-doctoral research positions at other universities for 2–4 years, emerging at 30–32 years of age as applicants for junior faculty positions. These are the candidates who made up the pool of 419 applicants for our search.
How did our search conclude after six months of work by our faculty and nearly 20 candidate interviews? We made three offers: to a white male, a Hispanic male, and a white woman. The first two joined us and the woman turned us down to accept a more lucrative offer to join the faculty of another top-ranked program. From our perspective, the search was a tremendous success as it brought two outstanding young faculty members to the University in a critical discipline. We also increased our faculty diversity. We hope both young faculty members will excel at teaching and research and attain tenure after their eight-year probationary periods as untenured assistant professors. Based on data from 2006 for several members of the Association of American Universities (AAU; the organization of 60 leading United States research universities), the tenure success rate for major research universities is just above 50%.
I hope this testimony illustrates Boston University’s commitment to achieving and maintaining diversity in our student body and faculty. Let me end with an excerpt from the University’s Diversity Statement that I referred to earlier:
…Success in a competitive, global milieu depends upon our ongoing commitment to welcome and engage the wisdom, creativity, and aspirations of all peoples. The excellence we seek emerges from the contributions and talents of every member of the Boston University community.
I look forward to learning about the constructive discussions that you have indicated you plan to conduct with other Boston universities as the Committee continues to deliberate these important issues.
Sincerely,
Robert A. Brown
President