Trends in Postsecondary Education - Trends In Conferred Doctor's/first-professional Degrees: Race/ethnicity And Residency

The chart shows the numbers of doctor's degrees earned from 1977 to 1997. The most striking trends are the decline in the percentage share for non-Hispanic whites and the dramatic increase (202%) in the share earned by non-resident aliens. Little progress has been made in narrowing the educational gap at the highest degree levels between whites and minorities other than Asians/Pacific Islanders.

Foreign students comprise fewer than 4% of all students in American higher education but are 33% of doctoral students. They earned 25% of doctor's degrees awarded in 1997. Their specialties were biological sciences/life sciences (28% of degrees awarded), engineering (48%), and physical sciences/science technologies (35%). Fewer American students are concentrating in these areas, and the American scientific community is increasingly dominated by foreign-born scientists who are either educated here and stay or who immigrate.

Another notable trend in the awarding of doctor's degrees is the fact that African-Americans continue to lag behind whites and other minority groups in mathematics. The American Mathematical Society reports that the number of mathematics doctoral degrees that have gone to blacks since 1980 has rarely exceeded 10 each year, and only 15 (1.3%) of 1,119 awarded in 2000 went to blacks (who are 12.9% of the population).⁷ In contrast, Asians/Pacific Islanders, who make up 3.8% of the population, received 16.7% of mathematics doctorates.

The table below shows the number of first-professional degrees conferred by racial/ethnic group, and field of study, in the 1996-97 year. One-fifth of the degrees went to minorities. Notice that Asians/Pacific Islanders earned 15% of medical degrees while blacks earned 7%. Fifty-eight percent of American Indians/Alaskan Native degrees were in law, compared to 51% for the general population.

Perhaps you've noticed that you are being seen by more foreign-born doctors lately. More than half of non-resident aliens in the class of 1997 chose a medical specialty, and many decided to remain in the United States. Nineteen percent of foreign students devoted themselves to the study of theology.

First-Professional Degrees Conferred by Racial/ethnic Group and Major Field of Study: 1996-97

Field	Total	White, non-Hispanic	Black, non-Hispanic	Hispanic	Asian/Pacific Islander	American Indian/Alaskan Native	Non-resident alien
All fields	77,815	59,852	5,251	3,553	7,037	511	1,611
Dentistry	3,784	2,498	190	185	659	19	233
Medicine	15,571	11,095	1,123	703	2,377	111	162
Optometry	1,264	929	31	41	198	5	60
Osteopathic	2,011	1,676	72	50	181	17	15
Pharmacy	2,708	1,829	265	58	466	12	78
Podiatry	614	473	27	24	65	3	22
Veterinary	2,188	1,988	54	71	45	14	16
Chiropractic	3,654	2,986	62	90	196	18	302
Law	40,079	31,672	2,951	2,211	2,534	298	413
Theology	5,859	4,632	472	120	311	14	310

America's most educated individuals are a more diverse lot than they were in 1977. The first-professional class of 1997 was 77% white, 42% female, 6.7% black, 4.6% Hispanic, 9% Asian/Pacific Islander, 0.6% American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 2% foreign-born. They preferred by far the lucrative specialties of medicine and law, with theology a distant runner-up.

Source: Chart: "Doctor's degrees conferred by institutions of higher education, by racial/ethnic group and sex of student: 1976-77 to 1996-97," primary source, U.S. Department of Education, NCES, Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), "Degrees and Other Formal Awards Conferred" surveys, and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), "Completions" surveys; retrieved 3/27/02 from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000. Table: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data. "Racial disparities especially acute in math PhD programs," The Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2001, p. 20.