Responding to a scarcity of blacks earning advanced science degrees, the federal government, corporations and academia have created an expensive pipeline intended to sweep promising students toward careers in research and teaching.
Once they reach college, top black students are taking advantage of grants, fellowships and programs such as research trips abroad intended to cement their commitment to science.
Kimani Stancil, a budding black physicist whose race makes him a rarity, is weighing two scholarships to do his doctoral work in chaos theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A talented student who was a state chess champion at Baltimore's Polytechnic Institute, Mr. Stancil has benefited from a string of opportunities for minority science students.
He spent a summer doing research at Bell Labs in New Jersey and a summer at MIT. This summer he will work with lasers in the Kodak lab in Rochester, N.Y.
Mr. Stancil, 22, recently earned his bachelor's degree with a double major in physics and mathematics from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. As a Meyerhoff Scholar, his education was free. It was worth about $50,000, including extras such as a personal computer and summer internships.
If everything goes as planned, Mr. Stancil will emerge in six or seven years with a doctorate in physics from MIT. Nationwide, only seven blacks earned doctorates in physics in 1992.
Mr. Stancil, whose family lives in Bolton Hill, takes all of his opportunities in stride. The goal, he says, is an important one.
"We need more African-American scholars, basically," he said, pointing to a need to overcome negative stereotypes about young black males. "If we have more scholars, then changes can really occur."
The effort to recruit and nurture young black scientists is uncoordinated and not quantified. But it's clear the amount spent on the pipeline reaches into the hundreds of millions of dollars. For example:
* The National Institutes of Health will spend more than $60 million this year on research and training opportunities for minority college students.
* In April, the Pew Charitable Trust put $3.5 million into a new program designed to attract 200 students a year into doctoral programs.
* Countless universities and corporations offer their own scholarship and training programs for minority students. Overall, for example, colleges award about 4 percent of their scholarship dollars on the basis of race, according to a study released in January by the General Accounting Office in Washington.
Results discouraging
Although the number of programs has grown in recent years, results have been discouraging.
In 1982, 1,047 black Americans received doctorates. Ten years later, in 1992, the number had shrunk to 951, according to the National Research Council.
In that decade, the total number of doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. universities increased from 31,111 to 38,814. Foreign students from Asia accounted for the vast bulk of the growth.
In the sciences, the numbers are particularly grim. In 1992, the nation's universities awarded 896 doctorates in physics. Only seven went to blacks, according to the National Research Council. There were four blacks with doctorates in mathematics, five in computer science, and only 49 in all engineering fields.
"It's still a serious problem, the shortage of well-prepared African-Americans in science and engineering," said Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of UMBC.
Many of the brightest minority students have been rejecting the pursuit of doctorates and careers in academia, opting instead for medical school and the financial and social rewards of becoming physicians.
In 1992, for example, only 114 blacks received doctorates in life sciences. The same year, 850 blacks earned medical degrees.
"At this point, professional schools are quite a bit ahead of us because of the economic climate, the recession," said Shin Lin, associate dean for research and graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
Most of the nation's universities are looking to diversify both their student bodies and faculties. But with so few blacks earning doctorates, colleges are hard-pressed to find faculty candidates.
Hopkins' hires
Hopkins this year offered positions to one Hispanic and two black professors in the sciences. Only one, a black instructor in applied mathematics, accepted. The university also hired two black professors in liberal arts.
Before these hires, Hopkins had only two blacks on its Homewood campus faculty, neither in the sciences, a situation that black students protested two years ago.
Since then, Hopkins has set aside fellowship money for promising minority graduate students who don't make the normal cut in the admissions process. By this fall about a dozen minority students will be enrolled in doctoral programs, thanks to the fellowships, Dr. Lin said.
The university also chose to kick in an extra $3,000 in stipends to match offers to two top-notch black applicants being wooed by other universities.
"They are outstanding. Everybody is after them. Harvard, Yale, everybody is offering higher stipends than our normal stipends," Dr. Lin said. "These are people who might have come for less money but we didn't want to take a chance."
In a new program coordinated by the University of Maryland at Baltimore medical school, black college students travel to the Netherlands, where they receive room and board and a $3,000 stipend to do research at Erasmus University School of Medicine in Rotterdam.
The Fogarty Minority International Research Training Program is funded by a three-year, $1 million NIH grant.
Fifteen black undergraduates majoring in science, most from Maryland colleges, left early this month.
"I've already done research here in the city," said Sandra Moore, a 21-year-old UMBC student from West Baltimore who went to Rotterdam. "The opportunity to travel abroad, see Europe and gain experience was the main thing that made this attractive."
"This is for students who want to compete at a higher level," said Jordan E. Warnick, director of student research programs at the UM medical school.
Sydney L. Cousin Jr., 19, of Columbia, picked the Rotterdam trip over an offer to work with a Hopkins researcher this summer.
"I think this is a better opportunity, to travel around, see the world. It's something I can put down when I apply to graduate school," he said.
Along with Mr. Stancil and Ms. Moore, Mr. Cousin won one of the Meyerhoff scholarships for promising blacks studying science or engineering at UMBC.
"If the opportunity exists, I'm going to take advantage of it," Mr. Cousin said of the financial support. "I feel that I've earned most ,, of the things I've received."
Mr. Cousin has been interested in science since he was about 10 and intends to earn a combination M.D.-Ph.D. and go into a research-teaching career.
Stan Angus, a UMBC graduate who plans to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall to earn an M.D.-Ph.D. in neuroscience, said his Meyerhoff scholarship and summer research opportunities allowed him to concentrate on his studies.
"Some people have to work to find the tuition. I didn't have to worry about that," Mr. Angus, 22, said. "It really does help us to get a lot of pressure off of our backs, so we can enjoy going into the labs and try to broaden our minds."
Need not considered
Few of the scholarship and research programs for minorities take a student's financial need into account.
The Banneker program at the University of Maryland College Park, for example, gives scholarships to promising black students interested in all fields, with or without financial need.
In what could be a precedent-setting case, the Banneker program has been challenged in court by Daniel J. Podberesky, a straight-A, part-Hispanic student, who says it amounts to reverse discrimination.
A federal judge ruled last year that the scholarships were legal to rectify past discrimination against blacks at College Park, and the case is pending on appeal. Mr. Podberesky graduated last month with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry.
There have been few other challenges to the growing number of race-based academic opportunities, said Richard A. Samp, Mr. Podberesky's attorney.
But he contends programs designed to foster campus diversity, rather than to rectify past discrimination, are vulnerable. "There's still a lot of litigation to come in that area, regardless of how our suit comes out," he said.
In their search for diversity, colleges face a shortage of well-prepared minority students coming out of high school, especially in the sciences.
Baltimore gets grant
The National Science Foundation acknowledged that last month when it awarded $135 million in grants to nine cities, including Baltimore, to improve math and science instruction in the public schools.
"A lot of the kids just aren't making it through high school," said Clifton Poodry, director of minority research programs at NIH.
"If they don't have a view of themselves in a professional career, all too often, high school is a meaningless affair," Dr. Poodry said. "Once you've missed high school algebra, you might as well kiss off a professional career in the sciences."