Funds from this grant will support activities by Purdue University to recruit qualified, eligible Native American students for enrollment in graduate study in science or engineering, as well as a variety of activities designed to help meet the challenges facing Native students pursuing graduate work. Supported activities include recruitment trips by Purdue faculty to schools with Native students studying science and engineering as undergraduates, visits by prospective students to Purdue, design and production of print and web-based outreach materials, an annual retreat for enrolled students, regular mentoring for Native students, and coursework about successfully integrating the demands of graduate study with the demands of membership in a tribal community.

The National Action Council for Miniorities in Engineering (NACME) has been the Foundation's longtime partner in its grantmaking in the Education for Underrepresented Groups program, administering both the Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications, selects students for scholarships, administers awards, and supports recruitment efforts by participating faculty. This grant funds new obligations in these programs incurred from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011. Funds will be used to provide scholarships to newly accepted minority Ph.D. students in both programs, support efforts to recruit new students, and support established "feeder" programs at North Carolina A&T and the University of Puerto Rico that have proven successful in graduating minority students who go on to graduate study in science and engineering.

The University of Arizona was the first campus to participate in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership and it remains the flagship of the program. Funds from this grant will support the University's efforts to recruit qualified indigenous students to its program, and to provide the resources and institutional support necessary to meet the needs of students from indigenous or tribal backgrounds. Providing such support is a crucial component of enabling indigenous students to successfully complete graduate work, and the University of Arizona anticipates that through its efforts, degree completion among supported students will exceed 90%, an estimate consistent with its record thus far

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.