INCREASING POLITICAL SCIENCE ENROLLMENTS CAN DIVERSIFY STEM

Anxiety about the leaky STEM pipeline relates less to the overall number of STEM students than to the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities (van den Hurk, Meelissen, and van Langen Reference van den Hurk, Meelissen and van Langen2019). Political science faculty can address this concern with two related strategies: (1) by recruiting more students into a subfield of STEM that already is relatively diverse; and (2) by using undergraduate research labs to retain diverse students in political science.

Political science is more diverse than other branches of STEM, notwithstanding continued roadblocks to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the discipline (Nonnemacher and Sokhey Reference Nonnemacher and Sokhey2022). Figure 1 displays data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Mueller Reference Mueller2022) on bachelor’s degrees awarded between 2012 and 2020 in political science as well as four other subjects representing each element of STEM: biology (representing science), computer science (representing technology), engineering, and math. I chose biology instead of another natural science (e.g., chemistry or physics) because it was the most diverse. This allowed me to compare political science to the best-case scenario in terms of racial and gender diversity in the natural sciences. The first two panels in figure 1 show the annual percentage of degrees conferred to two historically underrepresented groups: Hispanic/Latinx students (left panel) and Black students (center panel). The third panel shows the percentage of degrees awarded to women at the five institutions that graduated the most degrees in a given field and year.

Figure 1

Diversity Trends in Undergraduate STEM Degrees

Data are from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Mueller Reference Mueller2022).

Hispanic/Latinx, Black, and women graduates are consistently better represented in political science than any other field (although absolute minority representation remains low), with the exception that women are better represented in biology. The percentage of Hispanic/Latinx and women political science graduates is climbing steadily but the percentage of Black graduates is not. Combined, these patterns imply that political science attracts more diverse students than other STEM disciplines and that adding more political science undergraduates may be a low-friction way to prevent STEM from “leaking” women and minorities. Of course, there may be reasons to be concerned about low diversity within individual STEM fields, which the literature on diversifying “STEM” in the aggregate tends to overlook.

Simply recruiting more students into political science classrooms does not prevent attrition. To retain diverse students, Nonnemacher and Sokhey (Reference Nonnemacher and Sokhey2022) suggest using a cornerstone of STEM: the research lab. The functional definition of “laboratory” has evolved from its strict etymological meaning of “labor” (from the Latin laboratorium) and its early use in reference to medieval workshops. Today, scholars of all stripes commonly say “lab” when referring to any “space of knowledge which primarily [serves] to establish new scientific facts” (Schmidgen Reference Schmidgen2021, 1). Social science labs are not stereotypical spaces with expensive instruments and staffed by researchers clad in white coats. They even can be virtual spaces for collaboration among scholars and students honing their research skills and seeking answers to overlapping questions, whether or not using experimental methods (Cetina Reference Cetina1999, 35). Although labs are associated more with the natural sciences, they increasingly are recognized in the social sciences as spaces that “foster community through professionalization and socialization events that encourage students to form personal connections with one another and faculty” (Nonnemacher and Sokhey Reference Nonnemacher and Sokhey2022, 414). Political science faculty can help to patch the leaky STEM pipeline by recruiting more students into already diverse classrooms and then using labs to keep them engaged. Some institutions, including the Political Physiology Laboratory at the University of Nebraska, are leading the way in this collaborative model of political science research (McDermott and Hatemi Reference McDermott and Hatemi2010, 51).

COLLEGE PRIMES STUDENTS TO THINK LIKE (POLITICAL) SCIENTISTS

Although children evince political orientations as early as primary school (van Deth, Abendschön, and Vollmar Reference van Deth, Abendschön and Vollmar2011), higher education exposes young people to unprecedented political stimuli (Crossley and Ibrahim Reference Crossley and Ibrahim2012). Colleges and universities facilitate communication among students of diverse backgrounds and offer a variety of voluntary civic organizations, from debate teams to student newspapers. They are notorious “hotbeds of activism” (Van Dyke Reference Van Dyke1998).

However, institutions of higher learning also engender less conspicuous forms of political consciousness and involvement that prime students for studying political science. The attitudes, values, and feelings that students absorb by discussing politics with their classmates and professors manifest not only externally (e.g., at a protest or in the voting booth) but also internally, as a hunger for explaining empirical variation in political phenomena. Undergraduate students may begin to question with greater urgency than earlier in their life: “Why do some people vote whereas others do not? What policies can effectively reduce income inequality?” Social science students exhibit pronounced “political attentiveness” compared with students in other majors (Hillygus Reference Hillygus2005, 28). Such attentiveness, forged in the context of first-hand political experiences and political material in the classroom, can motivate undergraduates to wield scientific tools for “scratching an intellectual itch.” Any personal question about how politics works is a possible research question.

Curiosity alone does not make a scientist. Students also need encouragement from faculty to channel their political interests into research projects. Undergraduate political science courses consist predominantly of dissecting secondary texts as opposed to analyzing primary data. Scanning syllabi that are available online reveals that exams and response papers vastly outnumber original research assignments. Conventional pedagogies still may have their place in a curriculum, but conducting primary research modeled on the scientific method is essential if political science is to serve as a back door to STEM—that is, because science blends innate curiosity with “principles of logical reasoning” (Rutherford and Ahlgren Reference Rutherford and Ahlgren1990, 5).

Completing an ambitious research project transforms an undergraduate student from a consumer to a producer of knowledge. A former student described this metamorphosis as follows:

Producing knowledge demands a different toolkit from taking an exam or composing a typical term paper. Some students find the scientific method constraining at first, but many come to embrace it; breaking down a project into steps can be less overwhelming than writing a lengthy paper with no prescribed roadmap. It also can be liberating for students to hear that the goal of science is uncovering “truth,” not being right.

Alumni recall how research taught them to push their cognitive limits and to welcome the discomfort of uncertainty as an opportunity to learn. One former student said, “Knowing that I’ve taken on a large challenge in the past, and saw it through successfully to the end…is one of the data points that to me lends legitimacy to my daily mantra that I can still do hard things.” Another chimed in, “What keeps me motivated is continual learning, and I learn more when I’m unfamiliar with the terrain but able to bring in processes or facts that support or oppose the new knowledge or scenario I’m presented with…. I learn best by being able to be engaged, ask questions, and identify pitfalls and solutions in the projects and places I’m moving through.”

College is great at making students think about politics; research experiences build on that foundation by helping them to think like (political) scientists. The following section elaborates on the importance of research in political science and STEM more broadly.

RESEARCH IS THE KEY INGREDIENT OF A STEM EDUCATION

John Dewey was among the fiercest advocates for infusing more science into school curricula. Although he conceded that all students should not be expected to master “specialized scientific matters,” he insisted that they leave school with “some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief” (Dewey Reference Dewey1910, 126). He distinguished science as subject matter (i.e., information that scientists have already discovered) from science as method (i.e., tools for making new empirical discoveries). Only the latter, he asserted, could help students grow into high-functioning adults. Dewey’s contention relates to this current article because it highlights how a political science education must involve research if it is to patch the leaky STEM pipeline in a meaningful way. It is not enough for students to memorize the capitals of countries, recite the Gettysburg Address, or write down five different definitions of “democracy” on a final exam. Becoming a (political) scientist requires participating—however modestly and incrementally—in discovering fresh truths.

Dewey maintained that conducting research was a necessary component of students learning how to discern fact from “mere opinion or guess-work or dogma” (Dewey Reference Dewey1910, 125) and that the scientific method should not be confined to the natural sciences (Dewey Reference Dewey1910, 127). The volume of learnable information is boundless, and students have localized informational needs. As a result, educators tend to “oscillate, helpless, between arbitrary selection and teaching a little of everything” (Dewey Reference Dewey1910, 123). The only solution, Dewey held, was to teach students how to think original thoughts instead of drilling them on a jumble of facts.

Recent studies defend Dewey by confirming that a curriculum based on “science as method,” especially in collaborative lab-like environments, sets up students for lifelong interests in math and science and access to jobs in STEM fields. One longitudinal study found that underprivileged students who took project-based, active math classes demonstrated better mathematical comprehension and professional achievement as adults compared with students who experienced more passive curricula (Boaler and Selling Reference Boaler and Selling2017). Replicating such engaged learning in political science classrooms can open up the same long-term benefits of STEM education to students who have “slipped through the cracks” of orthodox STEM schooling.

More than a century after Dewey penned his reflections, US high school students who want to learn science as method still must generally take classes in the natural sciences. Curricular designers in the early twentieth century segregated the study of science from “social studies” (US Bureau of Education 1916). This decision made sense at a time before political science took its behavioralist turn in the 1950s and 1960s (Adcock Reference Adcock, Adcock, Bevir and Stimson2007), but it inadvertently sent students the message that scientists study a narrow set of questions about chemical reactions and planetary orbits rather than a more expansive set of questions about society. As a legacy of reformers writing political science out of secondary-school curricula, college often is the first time a student uses science, technology, and math to solve empirical puzzles about political behaviors and institutions. Undergraduate research in political science, therefore, is a late opportunity to expose nontraditional students to science as method.

Colleges and universities can patch the leaky STEM pipeline by funding summer research grants not only in chemistry and physics but also in political science. This might involve giving political science faculty teaching credit for supervising independent projects or helping political science departments to set up labs for collective research. These options are not limited to large research universities. For example, Haverford College counts the supervision of senior theses toward the faculty teaching load,Footnote ³ and the Collaborative Summer Research Program at Macalester College provides stipends and project expenses to students who are working on research with their professors.Footnote ⁴