'Weed Out' the Diversity?

Science’s Jeffrey Mervis this week reports that the "time-honored practice of using introductory courses to weed out students seeking degrees in science and engineering hinders efforts to attract more women and minorities into those fields." Citing data from a survey conducted by the Bayer Foundation, in which "more than 400 chairs from the top-200 research universities and from minority-serving institutions responded to a series of questions on their attitudes toward underrepresented minorities," Mervis says 46 percent of respondents indicated that such courses generally hamper diversity. The foundation's Rebecca Lucore calls her team's results "eye-opening," telling Science that she and her colleagues "were shocked last year when many of the students said that [college] was where they were discouraged from going on in science."