Formula for Success : Caltech Program for High School Students Seeks to Increase Ranks of Minority Scientists

Take 40 teen-age science whizzes from disadvantaged backgrounds. Stick them for six weeks in college laboratories crammed with expensive equipment and personalized instruction. What do you get?

For 17-year-old Angie Gonzales from Porterville in Central California, the answer is sheer ecstasy.

“In my high school chemistry class, we had three labs the entire year,” said Gonzales, rolling her eyes. “Here we’re constantly in the lab, doing stuff we couldn’t even imagine at home.”

“Here” is Caltech, the prestigious Pasadena institute that turns out some of the finest scientists in the country. Last year, it started a summer program that targets minority students who show aptitude in science and engineering.

Eduardo Grado, who heads minority recruitment at Caltech and runs the program, says disadvantaged students, especially Latinos and African-Americans, lag far behind Anglos and Asian-Americans in science, academically and professionally. He blames this on lowered expectations and lack of access to advanced classes and laboratories.

“The quality of education is not uniform across the country,” Grado said. “These kids need more people who believe in them and push them. They also need the facilities. We want to show them that science is fun.”

This year, 300 students nationwide applied for 40 openings in the high school program. Students live in dorms, eat at a campus cafeteria and are exposed to college life. The usual day is 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with morning classes such as chemistry and afternoon labs in physics and biology. Students also receive $500 tool kits to take home for their own experiments.

Caltech hopes the program, funded by private and corporate donations, may inspire some of the students to pursue careers in science. They have made a start: Four from last year’s class will be freshmen at Caltech this fall.

But there is far to go. Of 1,100 doctoral students at Caltech, Grado said, only eight are Latino and three are African-American. By contrast, the school has 98 doctoral students from the People’s Republic of China.

Nationwide, 5% of employed scientists and engineers are Asian-American, 2.6% are black and 1.8% are Latino, according to a 1990 National Science Foundation study. The general population is 2.9% Asian-American, 12.1% black and 9% Latino.

Angie Gonzales hopes to be the first in her family to graduate from college. Her biology teacher was so excited about the Caltech program that she drove the teen-ager from Porterville and deposited her personally at the dorm in Pasadena.

Willie Pike, 17, who lives on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona and attends a reservation school, spent 13 hours traveling to Caltech by bus and says it was worth every minute. “Here we have an opportunity to learn a lot more,” he said.

Grado, 34, understands these students. He went to a poor high school in El Paso that lacked labs and advanced science classes. But motivated by his parents and several teachers, he won several math competitions and was accepted by MIT. He earned a bachelor’s degree in management science and was hired as MIT’s director of minority admissions. Under his tenure, minority enrollment grew from 9% to 16%.

Last year, Grado came to Caltech. He says minority students often tell him about teachers who discouraged them from taking demanding courses. “Students will rise to the level of expectation, but sometimes expectations aren’t high enough, especially for disadvantaged or minority students,” he said.

Caltech, by contrast, challenges them. There are tests asking “What is a diode?” and hands-on assignments such as “construct a high-voltage power supply.” Students receive high school credit for the classes they take.

On field trips, the students have visited Landers and the San Andreas Fault and toured the Palomar Observatory. They have chatted over dinner with eminent scientists such as David Goodstein, a Caltech physics professor who developed the public television series “The Mechanical Universe.”

Although the concept of an exciting career in science is novel to some students, others need little coaxing. Salim Jordan, 17, lives a block from Florence and Normandie avenues, a flash point of the Los Angeles riots.

As a child, Salim besieged his father, a self-employed plumber, with questions about the tools he brought home. At Long Beach Polytechnic High School, Salim studies Japanese and Russian as well as science and math.

This summer, he is spending his spare time building a shortwave radio from scratch with his friend, Jon James, who is from Compton.

“It’s not every day that 17-year-olds get to work with thousands of dollars of equipment,” Salim said gleefully. “But they trust us here. They give us responsibility.”