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.
