The proposed follow-on project seeks to strengthen the capacity of the NSF funded Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) network to evaluate recruitment and retention of underrepresented African American, Hispanics, and Native Americans in STEM fields. The AGEP network consisted of 23 alliances serving approximately 80 institutions. The previous work led to development of a preliminary framework and some indicators to track underrepresented student recruitment, retention, academic progress, and degree completion at the participating institutions on a longitudinal basis from 1996-97 through 2002-03. The new work would extend this implementation into subsequent years and would investigate ways to refine the framework and to standardize indicators better across institutions. The main goal of this work is to establish an "evaluation culture" at each AGEP institution that would be guided by a central framework across institutions and that the individual institutions could adapt to their local circumstances.
