This grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) will fund new scholarship obligations in the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program (MPHD) and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) that are expected to be incurred between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012. NACME, the Foundation's longtime agent in administering these programs, receives and processes scholarship applications, selects students for scholarships, administers the awards, and supports recruitment efforts by faculty at participating colleges and universities. Funds from this grant will support 93 scholarships for minority students entering the Minority Ph.D. program in AY 2011-12 and 26 scholarships for students entering the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership in AY 2011-12.

This grant provides partial support to the University of Alaska, Anchorage for activities designed to recruit and retain indigenous graduate students in STEM disciplines as part of the university's participation in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) . This is the second three-year grant to the University of Alaska fund these activities. Principal Investigator Herb Schroeder and his staff had considerable success during their first grant, recruiting 26 students compared to an expectation of 18. Attrition has also been low, with the Alaska programs having lost only one M.S. and one Ph.D. student so far. Schroeder expects to recruit seven new students annually over the next three years. Some of the activities supported through this grant include cross-cultural training for faculty and staff who work with native graduate students, weekly team meetings, a recitation session devoted to strengthening the academic skills need to successfully complete graduate work, and workshops for helping students with professional networking, grant writing, and serving as an effective teaching assistant.

Swarthmore College is studying the migration of undergraduates into and out of STEM disciplines. In 2009 the Foundation supported efforts by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), the umbrella organization of 47 public, historically black universities, law schools and medical schools, to enable them to explore the possibility of some of their member campuses joining the Swarthmore-led STEM migration project or launching a similar project. Fund from this follow-on grant will enable 20 of the TMCF member campuses to join the Swarthmore-led project. The addition of 20 TMCF campuses to the STEM migration project would provide the basis for these campuses to improve STEM retention, provide a broader basis for each of the 44 campuses to compare its own performance with that of others, greatly expand the project's data on African American students, and facilitate further fundraising to sustain the project to which both Swarthmore College and TMCF are committed.

In February 2009 the Foundation funded a project by Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to enable them to develop a national strategy for enhancing the completion rate in STEM master's degrees. With these funds, CGS surveyed what was known about this subject, produced a paper that summarized what is known, outlined a research agenda for improving knowledge about what affects attrition and completion rates, and began laying out a taxonomy of STEM master's degrees. They also convened a meeting of researchers, graduate deans, and others to discuss the paper and what CGS could and should do further in this area. The strategy that emerged from this preliminary work calls for a two-phased follow-on program. The first phase, funding for which is provided through this grant, would (a) further develop a taxonomy of STEM master's programs; (b) establish standardized definitions for "entry", "attrition", and "completion" in STEM master's programs; (c) provide a first look at comparable completion and attrition rates within STEM master's programs in a variety of programs in a selected number of institutions; and (d) determine factors perceived to affect student success or attrition and identify promising practices to foster student success. Based on what is learned from all this, CGS will decide whether a second phase is warranted that would gather data on completion and attrition from a larger, more representative set of institutions and track implementation and effects of promising interventions designed to improve outcomes for all or a subset of STEM master's degree types.