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I think a lot of it is due to a lack of social support. A lot of URM's come from bad school districts and there isn't a structure there to cultivate potential engineers. That's a major problem in the United States -- not enough attention is put forth to identify students with the potential to do science and engineering.
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Yet I wonder why it is that many poor Asians who also go to the same bad school districts (because they can't afford to live anywhere else) still exhibit unusual academic success and a strong prediliction to enter science and engineering in college. Nobody needed to "identify" them, they just somehow identified themselves.
As a case in point, Sowell once pointed out (I believe in his book "Race and Culture") that back in the days of colonialism, Chinese students in Hong Kong outperformed white students in Hong Kong in standardized math exams despite the fact that practically all of the white Hong Kong students were rich because they were inevitably children of the ruling British imperial class who attended elite private boarding/international schools, whereas the Chinese were stuck with the public school systems.