‘AGENTS OF CHANGE’
The Meyerhoff Scholars Program has provided a boost to many students. Here is how three spent their senior year.
Adrian Davey was sitting in the back of his church when he first heard of the program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County that would change his life.
Davey, then a senior at Governor Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick, was finishing an impressive high school career: 3.97 grade point average, intern at the National Cancer Institute, peer tutor with the National Honor Society, defensive end on the football team, captain on the track team. Now he was planning to be a chemical engineer, and was considering the public university powerhouses Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina.
Tanya Davis, a fellow congregant at First Missionary Baptist Church, had some advice: “You should apply to the Meyerhoff program.”
Over the last 30 years, the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC has graduated more than 1,100 mostly African-American students in science and engineering, providing money, academic guidance, research experience, mentoring and a sense of family to underrepresented minorities in a lucrative and highly competitive field.
“Impressive, well-rounded game chang-
ers,” is how former Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski described this year’s seniors. They’re scheduled to graduate on Thursday.
Graduates include the current U.S. surgeon general, research scientists at Google, Intel, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and the NSA, and professors at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Johns Hopkins and other top universities.
That’s the kind of performance UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski III and Baltimore philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff had in mind when they launched the program in 1988.
Hrabowski, a veteran of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Children’s Crusade, wanted to create a science, technology, engineering and math program that would prepare underrepresented minorities for the nation’s most rigorous Ph.D. programs.
Meyerhoff, who witnessed discrimination while serving in the segregated Navy during World War II, wanted to show that on a level playing field, AfricanAmericans would perform at least as well as anyone else.
“We proved Meyerhoff says.
The program is a key reason that UMBC, a predominantly white public university, graduates more African-American students who go on to earn dual M.D.-Ph.D. degrees than any other school in the country. It has become a perennial entry in the annual rankings of up-andcoming and best-value colleges, and is graduating its first Rhodes scholar this week.
Davis, a member of a sorority that mentors young African-Americans, had seen Hrabowski talking about the program on “60 Minutes.” She knew Davey was interested in science.
Davey had never heard of the program. He had never heard of UMBC.
“I immediately applied,” he says. “It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
Four years later, he’s a leader on campus. The chemical engineering major has earned a GPA of 3.9, led original research into low-cost air pollution sensors and interned at the University of Texas and the University of California. He mentors younger students. He’s a poet and an aspiring young adult novelist. He’s president of the campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. He’s won offers to continue his studies in Ph.D. programs at Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, Berkeley, Michigan and Georgia Tech.
UMBC has tracked Meyerhoff graduates, and compared them with students who were offered a place in the program and declined.
African-American students in the program are twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering than those who decided to study elsewhere. They are five times more likely to earn a doctorate.
That’s important in a country where two-thirds of students who major in science or engineering abandon the field before graduation, and where AfricanAmericans make up 13.3 percent of the population but earn 6.4 percent of doctoral degrees.
The Meyerhoff program began in the fall of 1989 with a class of 19 AfricanAmerican men. The program was opened to African-American women the following year, and to students of all races and ethnicities in 1996.
It’s now a general scholarship program it many, many times,” with a focus on underrepresented minorities. Of the current 260 students, 63 percent are African-American, 15 percent are Caucasian, 11 percent are Asian, 10 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are Native American.
“The model here is to have all groups rising,” Hrabowski says.
Since that first class three decades ago, nearly 90 percent of Meyerhoff scholars have graduated in science and engineering. Of that 90 percent, nearly 90 percent have continued on to graduate or preofessional school.
“We show them a pathway to obtain a Ph.D. and help them construct a scientific identity,” program director Keith Harmon says.
Other universities have taken note. Penn State and the University of North Carolina partnered with UMBC five years ago to start Meyerhoff-style programs of their own with funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Early results show similar high retention rates and performance.
Howard University started a program modeled on Meyerhoff last year. Now the University of California, Berkeley is in talks with UMBC to set up a program next year.
The Baltimore Sun followed Meyerhoff scholars Davey; Ann Cirincione, a bioinformatics and computational biology major, classical pianist, writer and photographer from Silver Spring; and Tania Evans, a chemical engineering major and hip-hop dancer from Lanham, through their senior year on campus to learn the secrets of the program’s success. Ph.D. shortly thereafter.
For all the naysayers, Hrabowski had buy-in from one person who mattered.
Robert Meyerhoff is the nephew of Joseph Meyerhoff, the developer and philanthropist who grew a family fortune in construction and real estate. Robert Meyerhoff studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked under his uncle for a short time, and then built his own fortune in real estate. At 94, he still works out of his Cockeysville office.
When Meyerhoff served with the Seabees, the Navy’s construction force, the only blacks he saw were the staff who served meals to the white sailors.
“It upset me,” he says. “I always remembered that.”
He approached several colleges about setting up some sort of program to help, but none seemed interested.
“Maybe I didn’t talk to the right people,” he says.
At the time, UMBC students were holding sit-ins to protest racist incidents on campus. The school was graduating fewer than 18 African-Americans in science and engineering per year. Only one in the school’s history had gone on to earn a STEM Ph.D. Hrabowski and Meyerhoff met in 1988. “I didn’t really know about UMBC,” Meyerhoff says. But after a 15-minute conversation with Hrabowski, he knew he had the right man.
Some faculty objected, arguing against a race-based program and warning Hrabowski in a memo that it could harm the school’s reputation and research. Hrabowski and Meyerhoff sold the program to skeptical faculty as an experiment.
The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Foundation gave $500,000 to launch the program. The first class enrolled with all school expenses paid and a stipend.
“I wanted to treat them the same as my own children so that they did not have to work, and would have a small allowance so they could spend all their time on studies,” Robert Meyerhoff says.