In recent years our small program to improve retention and graduation rates for undergraduate and graduate students in STEM disciplines has focused on encouraging campuses to obtain and use good data on STEM enrollments, migration, retention, graduation rates and time-to-degree. Using small officer grants, we funded three projects: At the American Society for Engineering Education, focused on engineering. They are now ready to pilot test a new data collection template. At the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, focused on time-to-degree. They are now considering what their next step should be. At Washington University, focused on all of these issues for selective public universities, private universities, and private colleges. The latter project, with leadership now transferred to Swarthmore College, has sparked the desire to create and institutionalize a consortium of campuses that collect uniform institutional data and survey students in order to improve understanding of undergraduate student migration into and out of science, engineering and mathematics disciplines. The group will start by reviewing and revising, as appropriate, the data collection template and survey instrument that emerged from the previous, preliminary project. The participating institutions will then initiate regular collection and reporting of data and surveying of students. At this time, fifteen institutions have agreed to participate, many of which were also involved in the preliminary project. The consortium's executive committee continues to recruit additional institutions to participate. Because it is important to have a critical mass of participants, including within each category of institution, if this request is approved, we will not issue the first check until there are at least 16 committed institutions, at least five in each of the three categories: private colleges, private universities, and public universities.

Since 1998 students in our Minority Ph.D. Program who are committed to or are considering academic careers and their faculty mentors have been invited to participate in the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). The current request from SREB is for a three-year renewal of our grant that enables them to invite our students and faculty to the Institute and to run the next conference of campus directors with the Institute in 2010. For the most part, SREB proposed to continue doing what it has done successfully in the past. They will also make significant improvements in the areas of evaluation and in making participation in the Institute more meaningful to the students and faculty in our Indigenous Graduate Partnership Program. Participation in the Institute and the biennial conference is now an established and valuable component of the infrastructure of our minority programs that we would like to continue.

During 2009 we will be conducting a full review of our program for STEM Education for Underrepresented Groups, especially the Minority Ph.D. Program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Program. However, in order to avoid interrupting these programs while we conduct this review, we seek approval of funds that NACME will need to fund expected new obligations incurred during the 2009-10 academic year. NACME administers these two programs on a day-to-day basis, paying and monitoring both student scholarships and grants to campuses in the feeder component of the Minority Ph.D. program and to two special cases within that program. Grants to the campuses that participate in the Indigenous Graduate Partnership are not administered by NACME. Even while we review these programs, we are making the following immediate changes: Reducing the cost of the two programs by about 20% and imposing a cap on their spending. For AY 2009-10, the cap will be 100 new scholarships in the Minority Ph.D. program (compared to a target in recent years of 120) and 25 in the Indigenous Graduate Program compared to 33 in the current academic year. Tying each grant to NACME to a particular academic year cohort of students and to grants administered by NACME that are approved within the academic year. All renewal grants to universities that are administered by NACME will, for this year, be held to one year.