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First-time enrolment of Indigenous and Latinx students in US graduate-level programmes rose between autumn 2017 and 2018, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in Washington DC, which represents more than 500 universities, mainly in the United States.

The report found that first-time enrolment in PhD and master’s programmes grew by 8.3% and 6.8%, respectively, among American Indian/Alaska Native and Latinx students (Latinx refers to US residents with origins in Latin America). Among other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, maths and computer science saw a 40% and 14.2% increase in the proportions of American Indian/Alaska Native and Latinx graduate enrollees, respectively. The proportion of first-time black and African American enrollees in physical and Earth sciences rose by 12.5%. Results are based on responses from 589 institutions in an annual survey that examines graduate-school application and enrolment numbers.

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Yet, overall, US graduate-level programmes still have low proportions of students from minority ethnic groups. Black and African American students comprise 11.8% of total first-time enrollees, and Latinx students comprise 11.6%, the report found. Comparatively, according to the 2010 US census, black and African American people represent 13.4% of the nation’s population, and Hispanic or Latinx individuals represent 18.3%.

Indigenous students represent fewer than 1% of first-time enrollees, even though their total enrolment rose by 1.2% from a year ago. “More work has to be done in the graduate-education community to increase the representation of these students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” says report co-author Hironao Okahana, the CGS’s associate vice-president for research and policy analysis. “All fields of study need to be a welcoming place for people from a variety of different backgrounds.”

First-time international enrolment in graduate-level programmes fell for the fifth consecutive year, and is now down to 20% of all enrolment. The study found that the decline was most marked in engineering programmes, in which first-time enrolment of international students fell by 8.3% from 2017 numbers.

Female students continue to be outnumbered by their male counterparts in some graduate-level STEM programmes. They account, for example, for only 38.2% of physical and Earth-sciences graduate students and 32.1% of maths and computer-science students. “While the rate of growth for women in sciences looks good, there is still a long way to go to catch up,” says Okahana.