By David Bressoud @dbressoud

Last month I presented trends in Bachelor’s degrees earned in the mathematical sciences, with particular attention to gender disparities. This month I want to dig a little deeper into the different categories of students as tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in particular what has happened to the number of degrees in mathematics earned by students from traditionally under-represented minorities.

Figure 1 presents the most dramatic and discouraging data. Since 1990, African Americans have gone from earning 6% of Bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. to 10%. For the first decade, their representation among math degrees matched their representation among all degrees, growing to a high of 8.5% in 1997 and ’98. Since 2000, there has been a steady decline, dropping below 4% in 2019 and ’20 and just creeping up to 4.02% in 2021.

If we look at actual numbers, things don’t seem so bad (Figure 2). There was a significant drop in first decade of this millennium, but since then numbers have climbed back to where they were in the 1990’s. But that is not good enough. Going back to Figure 1 in last month’s column, we see that degrees in mathematics bottomed out in 2001. Since then, there has been a significant gain in the total number of math degrees, growing by 132% from 2001 to 2021. The drop in percentage for African Americans is the result of a sharp increase in others seeking a math degree. Nevertheless, it is discouraging that increased popularity among other groups has not been reflected in the African American population. What happened in the early 21st century that participation in mathematics by African Americans went down as it increased for all other groups? If any of my readers has insight into this, I would appreciate hearing from them.

Another interesting observation is that from 1990 to 2004, African American women far out-numbered men in earning math degrees. Except for American Indians where the numbers are so small that they show great volatility from year to year, this is the only racial or ethnic group tracked by NCES where women have ever outnumbered men among math majors. I know that Spelman, an HBCU for women, has had a very strong math program that might explain part of this, but the differences are so significant that that cannot be the whole story.

What about other STEM fields? Figure 3 adds the percentage of degrees earned in Engineering, Physical Sciences, Biological Science, and Computer Science. It is perhaps significant that as interest in mathematics dropped, rates of participation in computer science rose, and they have generally been high among African Americans, though less so over the past decade. As of 2021, mathematics had fallen behind all the other STEM fields including engineering, traditionally a laggard in enrolling African Americans.

It is instructive to see what has been happening with Hispanic Americans (Figure 4) and Asian Americans (Figure 5) across the STEM fields. As the representation of Hispanic students among all bachelor’s degrees has grown from 3% in 1990 to almost 16% in 2021, their representation in all the STEM fields has grown at a comparable pace. While their representation in mathematics is the lowest of any of STEM fields, it is not far below computer science. Of particular interest is the fact that their representation in the physical sciences, long lagging the other STEM fields, is now second only to the biological sciences.

For Asian Americans, the trends are intriguing. Since 1990 their share of bachelor’s degrees has gradually doubled from 4% to 8%. They have maintained representation in all the STEM fields that well exceeds that. Today they are well represented in mathematics, only falling below their level of representation in the computer and biological sciences. It is interesting to see how their interest in the computer and biological sciences has ebbed and flowed. From 2004 to 2009, the total number of bachelor’s degrees in computer science fell by 36%. Even against that fall, we see a precipitous fall in the percentage of these degrees that were earned by Asian Americans. From 2009 to 2021 the number of degrees in computer science has almost tripled, an increase of 176%. At the same time, representation by Asian Americans grew from 8.5% to 18.0%.

There is a similar if less dramatic pattern in biology. From 1998 to 2002 the number of their majors dropped by 10% while representation among Asian Americans dropped from 13.8% to 12.2%, a drop of 20% in the actual numbers. There seems to be a real sensitivity among Asian American undergraduates to the relative popularity of the various STEM majors.

I want to close with one last graph: the make-up of the math majors at five-year intervals from 1990 to 2000 (Figure 6). It illustrates the huge increase in the percentage of degrees going to students from outside the United States and the gradual increase in Asian and Hispanic majors. NCES only began allowing the designation as two or more races in 2011, so these only appear in the last two bars. It is interesting to note that as of 2020, White, Non-Hispanic, US citizens or permanent residents who accounted for over 80% of math majors in 1990 were down to less than 50%.

Note: The graphs are my creations, based on data from NCES annual reports going back to 1990.

Download the list of all past Launchings columns, dating back to 2005, with links to each column.