America's science community can breathe a sigh of relief: The provisions to tax graduate student tuition and eliminate the student loan interest deduction have been removed from the final version of the GOP tax bill. These provisions would have made it more expensive to attend graduate school, and would have discouraged students from low- and even middle-income families from considering a career in science. Losing these students would ultimately harm all of us because, as Science editor-in-chief Jeremy Berg wrote last week, it "would likely decrease [United States] economic viability and competitiveness as talent is lost from the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) enterprise."
Yet even without an assist from the tax bill, America is losing too much talent from its science and technology enterprise because we fail to bring in enough students from minority backgrounds. Walk into any university science lab today, and it may seem like a diverse place—our graduate programs attract students from all over the world, and the U.S. has gained greatly from the talent of immigrant scientists. But in these labs, you'll rarely see students and faculty from American minority populations. This suggests that we’re neglecting a large fraction of the talent pool among U.S. citizens, and thereby undermining our country's economic future.
In 2011, a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report described America's minority populations as "a vastly underused resource and a lost opportunity for meeting our nation's technology needs." The report presented several critical reasons for concern. One is that, while the U.S. has relied for decades on non-U.S. citizens to fill out its scientific workforce, the growing global competition for scientific talent makes our dependence on foreign scientists "an increasingly uncertain proposition." This is not because U.S. scientific institutions are losing their edge; rather, it's the inevitable result of growing scientific institutions in developing countries, like China. For many students from these countries, choosing an American university for graduate school will no longer be the obvious way to launch a career in science.
[For more on this story by MICHAEL WHITE, go to https://psmag.com/education/wh...needs-more-diversity]
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