UMaine Aims to Increase Minority Enrollment in Doctoral Graduate Programs
Contact: Scott Delcourt, associate dean of the graduate school, 207-581-3217; Nick Houtman, Dept. of Public Affairs, 207-581-3777
ORONO, Maine — Efforts to increase the diversity of the University of Maine graduate student population will get a boost from an annual $132,000 National Science Foundation grant over the next five years. The program will enable the university to enroll more minority group students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics doctoral degree programs.
Combined with additional UMaine funds for tuition waivers, health insurance and stipends, UMaine will invest over $900,000 in federal and matching funds over that period.
The initiative stems from UMaine’s partnership in the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NEAGEP), an organization whose goals are to bring more underrepresented students into academia where they can serve as a role models and mentors for students in the future.
NEAGEP began in 1999 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and includes MIT, Penn State, Rutgers and Boston University as well as minority serving institutions: Jackson State University, Lincoln University, Medgar Evers College and the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. This year, all New England land-grant universities have joined the alliance.
“The NEAGEP partnership links the University of Maine with some of the most prominent public research universities in the Northeast, as well as other institutions with significant undergraduate minority student populations. The benefits of this alliance extend well beyond the five years of funding,” says Deirdre Mageean, associate vice president for research and dean of the graduate school. “What we are striving for in this project is a cultural shift in how we mentor doctoral students.”
NEAGEP has received nearly $8.8 million in NSF funds to support minority graduate student enrollment and retention activities through 2009.
“The diversity of our graduate student community is important to us because students learn from the perspectives of people around them as well as from their own research,” says University of Maine Interim President Robert Kennedy. “Historically, minority groups are underrepresented in science, math and engineering programs. We want to draw graduate students from a deeper pool of applicants and inspire the talents of some who may have felt that graduate education was out of their reach.”
Funds will be used to recruit undergraduates from minority-serving institutions and to support those students in their efforts to achieve their educational goals, according to Scott Delcourt, associate dean of the graduate school. Those plans will include career development and networking activities involving the other NEAGEP institutions. UMaine will also bring undergraduate students to campus to work with faculty on summer research projects.
Mageean and Delcourt will coordinate efforts with participating UMaine graduate faculty and other NEAGEP partners to identify doctoral research opportunities for incoming minority students. The first round of undergraduate student researchers may come to UMaine as early as this summer.