North Carolina State University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, are collaborating to develop, implement and study the AGEP North Carolina Alliance model for creating institutional, department-level and faculty change to promote historically underrepresented minority US citizens who are completing their STEM doctoral degrees and progressing into faculty positions.
This alliance was created in response to the NSF's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program solicitation (NSF 16-552) The AGEP program seeks to advance knowledge about models to improve pathways to the professoriate and success of historically underrepresented minority (URM) graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in specific STEM disciplines and/or STEM education research fields. AGEP Transformation Alliances develop, replicate or reproduce; implement and study, via integrated educational and social science research, models to transform the dissertator phase of doctoral education, postdoctoral training and/or faculty advancement, and the transitions within and across the pathway levels, of URMs in STEM and/or STEM education research careers. This Alliance is also funded by the NSF's Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP).
As the nation addresses a STEM achievement gap between URM and non-URM undergraduate and graduate students, our universities and colleges struggle to recruit, retain and promote URM STEM faculty who serve as role models and academic leaders for URM students to learn from, work with and emulate. Recent NSF reports indicate that URM STEM associate and full professors occupy 8% of these senior faculty positions at all 4-year colleges and universities and about 6% of these positions at the nation's most research-intensive institutions. The AGEP North Carolina Alliance has the potential to advance a model to improve the success of URM graduate students and faculty in the STEM professoriate.
The AGEP North Carolina Alliance will employ institutional change strategies to improve the climate, practices and policies that positively impact URM graduate students and faculty in STEM. The Alliance engages university provosts and deans, as well as department heads, department-level faculty leaders and department graduate directors, to lead the transformation in science, engineering and computer science departments. The integrated research will examine faculty mentor training and barriers, and quality, of mentoring URM graduate student experiences. The formative evaluation is being conducted by Education Designs, Inc and the summative evaluation is conducted by Iowa State University's Research Institute for Studies in Education. There is an external advisory committee which will provide feedback to the team on the effectiveness and outcomes of the project, as well as the research, evaluation and dissemination work.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
