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How You Can Help Low-Income Students With Culture Shock

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After World War II, American higher education sought to promote upward mobility for new student groups, with varying degrees of success. But in the decades that followed, the nation’s most selective colleges routinely ignored or turned away thousands of talented working-class and poor students from both rural and urban areas.

These colleges are finally acknowledging the persistent challenges facing such students. More of them, including the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where I work, have started offering free or sharply reduced tuition to low-income students and have established offices to support them academically and socially.

But do selective colleges truly understand the struggles low-income students face when they are surrounded by high percentages of undergraduates from much wealthier families?

Wisconsin Science Festival to Tackle Representation in STEM

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“The festival is an annual event but this year, in particular, what we’re interested in is the mini-symposium on broadening participation in STEM,” Laura Heisler, Director of Programming for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation told Madison365. “It’s something that came up because we had research that showed women and people of color as underrepresented. So we wanted to broaden that study.”

What NSF’s new diversity grants say about attempts to help minority students

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Ted Hodapp has spent the past 5 years helping boost the number of minority students pursuing U.S. graduate degrees in physics. But Hodapp, who works on education and diversity issues at the American Physical Society in College Park, Maryland, knows the society’s Bridge Program will at best make only a small dent in the nationwide dearth of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans working in all science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. He wanted an opportunity to show that Bridge’s approach—which starts by encouraging graduate schools to de-emphasize scores on the standardized GRE entrance exam in the student selection process—could work in other STEM disciplines and, in doing so, promote the value of diversity in U.S. higher education.

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Alexandria, Virginia, gave Hodapp $10 million to make that happen. The grant was one of six 5-year awards that the agency announced on 6 September under its new Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) initiative, which NSF Director France Córdova rolled out in 2016 as one of her priorities. The $57 million outlay marks NSF’s first major investment in INCLUDES.

Do Chief Diversity Officers Help Diversify a University’s Faculty? This Study Found No Evidence

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When Baylor University began considering the creation of a chief-diversity-officer position a few years ago, many of James E. West’s colleagues said the role could help diversify the institution’s faculty.

That got West, an economics professor, thinking: What influence does an executive-level diversity position have on faculty demographics? West, whose work focuses on higher education, and three Baylor colleagues tried to find out.

In a working paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research, West and his colleagues analyzed the faculty diversity of 462 research institutions in United States before and after they hired chief diversity officers. The paper, which the authors say is the first study of the topic, also looks broadly at faculty hiring and student demographics.

The authors were unable to find any statistically significant increase in faculty diversity after the creation of a chief-diversity-officer position. But, as the paper notes, many other factors can affect faculty diversity, such as underrepresentation in the Ph.D. pipeline.

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Contact

Ahna Skop, PhD, DSc
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2426 Genetics
Madison, WI 53706
608-263-1593
skop@wisc.edu

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