Trapped by Education

From the issue dated April 6, 2007

How the discipline became the predominant one for black scholars, and what it's costing them

By JOHN GRAVOIS

One spring day in 2004, during her third year of doctoral study at Howard University, Angela E. Lee received a letter from the federal government telling her she had to look elsewhere for student loans.
The letter said that she had borrowed a total of $138,500 in federal student aid — a debt she had accumulated while financing her entire postsecondary education with a wearying combination of part-time jobs, occasional assistantships, and heavy borrowing. This amount, the letter informed her, was the "aggregate loan limit" for the government's Stafford loans. Ms. Lee was being cut off.
In the weeks that followed, Ms. Lee took to keeping the letter with her in her bag. "I carried it all summer long," she recalls, because it seemed so unreal. And not just to her: When she told her professors about what she owed, one of them was so incredulous that Ms. Lee had to pull out the letter as proof.
She still had at least one year to go to complete her Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Howard's School of Education — an auspicious goal, given that no one else in her family had finished college. But now Ms. Lee did not know how she would pay her way to the finish line. She knew of only one other education student who had received such a letter. Her sense of embarrassment told her that the two of them were alone.
That was then. Two years later at Howard, another student, Syretta James, received the same letter during her third year in the Ph.D. program in school psychology. After firing off a panicky group-e-mail message, she quickly learned that all of the other third-year doctoral students in the program had received similar letters. So had several other graduate students in the School of Education. In fact, so had just about everyone Ms. James knew at Howard.
Once the students found each other, they began comparing notes about which private banks to begin borrowing from. They called a meeting with the dean. And they referred to their problem in familiar shorthand — "maxing out," it was called. What had once been a lonely trial was now almost a rite of passage.
Across the country, graduate students' debts have grown significantly in recent years. They have been among the first victims as state support for universities fell off in the early 2000s, as some federal grants have flatlined, as operating costs have burgeoned, and as campuswide enrollments tick upward. Among doctoral programs, money often flows first to the so-called "highly fundable" fields of science and technology. For many students in other fields, borrowing is the only way forward.
The toll on black doctoral students like Ms. Lee and Ms. James has been especially severe. Not only do African-Americans enter universities with more economic hardships, but the academic fields that have faced the greatest financial strains in the past 10 years — and hence have generated the heaviest doctoral debt burdens — are also those with the highest African-American enrollments: the social sciences, the humanities, and, above all, education.
The situation is particularly grim for young black scholars in education, not because their average debt is the highest — it isn't quite — but because the field is home to so many of them. More than a third of black Ph.D. students earn their degrees in education. No other racial or ethnic group is as strongly concentrated in one field. So the fortunes of a vast proportion of African-Americans in academe sink or swim in a discipline that is itself barely afloat.
How did this happen? Many African-Americans see their presence in education as a proud legacy — a sign that those who have succeeded academically are turning their attention back to a sector where others have failed. But it is a legacy that brings serious costs for its inheritors, and there are no comparable lines of ascent into other fields. Moreover, history shows that the earliest generations of black scholars did not venture into education entirely of their own accord. Often it was simply where they were welcome. Often it was where they were pushed.
Wale's List
In the summer of 1945, Fred G. Wale, an executive with the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a philanthropic group, wrote a letter to 600 college and university presidents in Northern states asking them to consider hiring black scholars on their faculties.
Northern universities had become increasingly willing to accept black students into doctoral programs over the preceding decades, but they had made virtually no moves toward integrating the professoriate. To Wale's chagrin, that state of affairs persisted even though academe was suffering a severe postwar shortage of professors, and even though a growing number of black Ph.D.'s were waiting in the wings.
Wale drew up a list of 150 black scholars who had expressed interest in teaching at white institutions, and sent that to the presidents as well. According to James D. Anderson, a professor of education history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wale's list offers a rough portrait of the first generation of black doctorates in America.
Most of them had earned their Ph.D.'s from elite Northern universities — chiefly Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago — and had done so with the support of philanthropies like the Rosenwald Fund, Wale's employer. The scholars displayed a range of qualifications across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Only a small number held doctorates in education.
The list included Percy L. Julian, a world-renowned chemist who, for lack of a university post, was conducting his research at the Glidden Company, known for its paints; Ralph J. Bunche, a Harvard-educated political scientist who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950; and David Blackwell, a mathematician who had studied at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. Over the following months, the list grew as more black scholars came forward.
None of that made much of an impression on the recipients of Wale's letter, however. About 400 of the 600 presidents never wrote back. Nearly all of those who did reply attested to their colorblind, meritocratic hiring practices. But they resorted to deflections and excuses when Wale asked them why those principles had not resulted in the hiring of any black professors.
"To the best of my knowledge there is no group prejudice against Negroes on the staff at this university," wrote Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California, speaking of the system's Berkeley campus. "We have employed a Negro for a part-time coaching position with the football team for many years."
William A. Shimer, president of Marietta College, in Ohio, responded that he guessed black scholars "would be happier in certain other institutions where they would have Negro companions."
If one point can be gleaned from Wale's letter-writing campaign, it is that those "certain other institutions" — the more than 100 black colleges in America — were just about the only places where black scholars were welcome at midcentury.
This had a profound effect on the direction that later generations of African-Americans would take into academe, says Mr. Anderson. If a research scientist like Percy Julian was unemployable for lack of racial openness at white institutions, he was unemployable for lack of resources at black institutions. Black universities at the time were simply not equipped for high-level research, Mr. Anderson notes. Hence, he says, Julian lived out much of his career at the Glidden Company, where he could not "reproduce himself" in the form of more black Ph.D.'s in chemistry.
Black institutions were, on the other hand, well equipped to train teachers for segregated school systems, says Mr. Anderson: "If you were in the field of education, you had a whole industry underneath you" — an industry of black schools.
"When African-Americans asked themselves, Where's a place that I can get a doctorate and also have an opportunity to live out my profession? — well, education stood out."
Northern philanthropists, who took a self-professed "fatherly" interest in nurturing black schools and colleges, were also increasingly intent on supporting black doctoral candidates in education. By the time Wale compiled his list of black scholars, his organization, along with the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board, was already well on its way toward directing the next generation of African-American graduate students into the field.
All of this gave momentum to the notion that black scholars were most "suited" for work in education, Mr. Anderson writes. When the first African-Americans were hired by white universities, they were hired in education departments — even when it was not their field. One of the first black professors at a predominantly white institution was Allison Davis, an anthropologist who joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1942. But it was the department of education — not anthropology — that hired him.
In the years to come, as education schools and departments became more hospitable to black faculty members, the legacy reinforced itself. James Blackwell, an African-American sociologist who received his Ph.D. in 1959 and is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, says the greatest predictor of where black graduate students will enroll is the presence of black professors in a program. Education departments became magnets.
By 1976 almost 62 percent of new black Ph.D.'s were in education.
The proportion, although not the number, of black doctoral students in education has gone down since then. But the third of black doctoral students who specialize in education now find themselves in a field that is, in Mr. Anderson's words, "very much threadbare."
How threadbare? Between 2002 and 2006, according to data compiled by the Council of Graduate Schools, the Department of Education, the main agency supporting education research, went from giving out $41-million to graduate students to giving out $40-million. By contrast, in the same period, the National Science Foundation increased its support for graduate students working in the sciences from $153-million to $229-million, and the National Institutes of Health raised support from $651-million to $761-million for postdoctoral fellows alone.
Reach Back
After receiving her jarring letter from the federal government in 2004, Angela Lee managed to finish her Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Howard by the end of 2005 — on a fast track, and only after having accumulated another several thousand dollars of debt.
She took a job counseling students at North Carolina Central University, a historically black institution in Durham, where she still works. Her salary there is no match for her loan payments, however. So in addition to her 9-to-5 counseling job, she teaches nights at the university and works weekends at a local Barnes & Noble.
And still, most of her loans are under an economic hardship-deferral. "It hurts," Ms. Lee says, "because I know I've worked hard. I know I'm good at what I do."
She remembers conversations she has had with people outside academe, who seem as baffled as they are impressed by her years of study: "They say, 'Is it worth it? You're making less than me, and I only have a high-school diploma.'"
She thinks of her own brother, who began college but then decided to leave. "One of the reasons he didn't finish is because he ran out of funding," she says. "He chose not to get all of the loans. He was trying to work full time and pay for school, and they wooed him on the work side, and so he's there."
"He didn't complete his degree," she says, "and he's doing better than me."
Ms. Lee does not seem to pine for a different place in the academic universe, however — she does not wish to be in a lab or a library. Despite its pitfalls, education is the field that connects her to her own roots. "You don't want to feel like you're just in the ivory tower," she says. "You want to have a hand in the community."
No matter how far she has come, she says, "I need to reach back."
Picture of Neglect
Like many symbolically important institutions, Howard University, a mecca of black higher education, is set on a hill. And one of the most prominent pieces of architecture that the hilltop presents to the capital city below — atop a steep, grassy slope and a long set of concrete steps — is the old Miner Teachers College.
The stately colonial-revival building is a picture of quiet neglect. Its first floor contains a few offices, but the rest of the space is empty or under repair, and the stairs leading up to its main doors are crumbling.
The Howard School of Education, meanwhile, is housed in a drab building at the back of campus, amid loading docks and parking lots — a location that sometimes prompts doctoral students there to wonder about their place in the constellation of Howard's concerns.
Orlando Taylor, dean of the Graduate School at Howard, presides over an institution that produces more black Ph.D's than any other research university, and he is more aware than many college administrators of graduate students who face severe debt. But Mr. Taylor, who earned his own Ph.D. in education in 1966, directs much of his energy toward nurturing black students in the scientific fields, where their enrollments are often abysmally low but financial support is greater.
National organizations like the Council of Graduate Schools talk frequently about high black graduate-student debt and, in the same breath, low black enrollments in science and technology. (In congregations of graduate deans, those are usually referred to as science, technology, engineering and medicine, or STEM fields — an acronym that can have the awkward effect of making other academic pursuits sound flimsy.)
Often, increased black enrollments in the sciences are presented as the solution to the problem of black scholars' debt. "We have to figure out a way to get more of those students into those STEM fields," says Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the council.
However, when presented with the issue of low black enrollments in the sciences, many of Howard's doctoral students in education immediately see themselves as part of the solution, not part of the problem. Because even if higher education has failed black students, they say, primary and secondary education has failed them even more.
Leaving Laurel
Janine Jackson attended Laurel High School, in Maryland, before heading to Florida Atlantic University for a bachelor's degree, working for a time as a teacher in Florida, and then going to Howard for a doctorate in educational psychology. Upon beginning her doctoral studies, she went back to Laurel High School, this time to teach.
She entered the field of education largely because of a single high-school English teacher, she says: "I wanted to be the black Ms. Burnsides." But apart from Ms. Burnsides's influence, Ms. Jackson suggests she made it to a doctoral program more despite her early schooling than because of it.
"I'm teaching at the high school that I graduated from, and my high-school experience wasn't the best," she says. "I came back to make peace."
To do so, Ms. Jackson asked to teach ninth-grade English to students below grade level, most of whom are black and male. In her classes are students whose parents told them, at age 12, that they could pretty much take care of themselves from there on out, and students who have abruptly disappeared to serve jail time. For them, Ms. Jackson feels, she is there to be an example.
"I think it's important for African-Americans to go into the field of education," she says. Then she mentions a bit of context that often gets overlooked: There may be more black doctoral holders in education than in any other field, but they are still not an overrepresented minority. "It is a predominantly white, female field," says Ms. Jackson. "I think it's important for African-American students to see people who look like them be successful. I want them to see that I have a bachelor's, I have a master's, and I'm pursuing my doctorate. I want them to see that."
Recently, however, she has had to broach the subject that she might need to leave. Living between ninth-grade English and the School of Education has simply spread her too thin. "One of them's going to have to give," she said one day last month outside the high school, as freezing rain fell in the parking lot. "It's either going to be my job, or I'll have to sit out a semester or a year."

A week later, Ms. Jackson decided: She would stop teaching and turn her attention to Howard full time. That meant not only saying goodbye to her students, but something else, too. For as long as she taught, she had been able to avoid going heavily into debt. Now, as she prepared to leave Laurel High again, she took out her first big loan.
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Section: The FacultyVolume 53, Issue 31