One of the objectives of our small program focusing on student retention in STEM disciplines at the undergraduate and graduate levels is to encourage universities to obtain and pay attention to data on the migration of their own students into and out of STEM disciplines. In the absence of such data, which most universities do not have, many campuses are either unaware of or ignore high net out-migration of students from their STEM departments. The result is wasted resources, underutilized faculty and facilities, and, depending on why students leave these disciplines, disappointed educational aspirations. Funds from this grant support a project by the American Society for Engineering Education to collect and report data on completion rates and time-to-degree in undergraduate engineering programs. Initial data collection will begin in the summer of 2012 with ASEE inviting all 380 U.S. engineering schools to participate. Data will be published in aggregate form, reporting separately on public and private institutions; schools that accept students as freshmen, sophomores, or juniors; and transfer and non-transfer students. The collected information will provide a rich dataset for scholarly analysis of student flows into and out of engineering.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) acts as the Foundation's agent in administering the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from eligible students, awards Sloan scholarships, sends checks to students, receives and monitors students' reports on their spending and their academic progress, interacts regularly with the faculty who are key to our programs' success, disburses funds to participating university campuses and departments to help them with recruitment and retention activities, monitors the spending of these funds, maintains the database for these Foundation programs, and performs analysis of these data. This grant to NACME funds the administrative costs associated with these activities for the next three years.

A large fraction of American Indian students begin their college careers at one of the thirty-three accredited Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). These institutions, most of which are associated with a particular tribe or set of tribes, are relatively new. Although most still provide only two-year degrees and certificates, others now offer a growing variety of four-year degrees and some offer master's degrees. Because of the important role of the TCUs in the education of Indian students, including those who major in STEM disciplines and go on to graduate work, it is important that these institutions' STEM faculty be capable of excellent teaching and guiding student research. Currently, approximately 28% of the 152 STEM faculty at TCUs have bachelor's degrees, 40% have master's degrees or are Ph.D. candidates, and 22% have doctorate degrees. An ongoing program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides scholarships to TCU faculty who are within one year of finishing their Ph.D. degrees with the understanding that these faculty would remain at their TCU institution for at least two years after earning their degree. Though the Mellon program has been successful in encouraging TCU faculty to finish graduate work (18 of 20 supported students have completed their Ph.D.) the supported faculty have largely come from fields outside science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with only two of the twenty supported fellows coming from STEM fields. Funds from this grant will provide monies to expand and supplement Mellon's successful program, administered by the American Indian College Fund, to more aggressively recruit and support faculty from STEM disciplines.

In October 2006, the Foundation approved a five-year grant to the University of Washington to enable Suzanne Brainard and her colleagues to assess the climate for women and underrepresented minority undergraduates in engineering schools across the country. Twenty-one engineering schools fully participated in the climate assessment-the Project to Assess Climate in Engineering (PACE)- 16 at public universities and 5 at private universities, accounting for 18 percent of the full-time engineering enrollments nationwide. Of these, 15 created and implemented action plans to make improvements based on the recommendations of the study. Funds from this grant will support the continuation PACE for three purposes: 1. Resurvey students in the 21 schools, compare the new responses to the pre-intervention responses, and analyze the results in light of the particular interventions made by each school. 2. Conduct focus groups involving approximately 40 students on each campus that administers the resurvey. 3. Code and analyze rich transcripts of student interviews that were conducted during the PACE project.

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.