29 January 2008
U.S. Universities Strive To Increase Student Diversity
University of Virginia wins award for graduate student program
Washington -- Supporting diversity and creating a sense of inclusiveness for minority and foreign-born students are growing priorities for U.S. graduate schools. The University of Virginia recently received a national award for its new program to support graduate student diversity.
The award -- the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS)/Peterson's Award for Innovation in Promoting an Inclusive Graduate Community -- recognizes innovative efforts to identify, recruit and retain minority graduate students.
“We know that having students from many different backgrounds ensures a diversity of thought, which we believe is an important element of research inquiry,” said R. Ariel Gomez, vice president for research and graduate studies at the University of Virginia (U.Va.). His office has established a new pilot mentoring program for graduate students from diverse backgrounds.
The program -- grounded in research conducted by University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Martin Davidson and Dartmouth College professor Lynn Foster-Johnson -- aims to address both the challenges faced by graduate students from underrepresented populations and the need for faculty mentors to understand the unique experiences of these students.
The CGS-Peterson’s award, presented at the Council of Graduate Schools annual meeting in Seattle in December 2007, includes a $20,000 grant to create an Inter-Ethnic/Interdisciplinary Mentoring Institute for Graduate Education.
A key component of the program will be the use of "reciprocal mentoring," a mutually beneficial process that nurtures students while raising the cultural sensitivity and mentoring skills of faculty.
“Students teach their teaching faculty in the process of learning from them,” Cheryl Burgan Evans, U.Va.’s director of graduate student diversity programs, explained in an interview.
“This is necessary at U.Va. because not enough minority faculty are available to meet the mentoring needs,” she said. Reciprocal mentoring helps to sensitize faculty to the needs of minority students.
U.Va. students tend to do well academically, and the university has a high retention rate, Evans said. What the university hopes to improve is its climate of inclusiveness. “[Foreign-born students] tend to do well, but they don’t always have such a positive experience on the personal and cultural side,” she said.
MINORITY ENROLMENT GROWTH
A recent CGS survey shows strong growth in the enrollment of every minority group in U.S. graduate schools over the past decade. Between 1996 and 2006, Hispanic enrollment grew an average of 5 percent each year, while African-American, Asian and American Indian enrollment grew an average of 4 percent a year, compared with no growth for white students. International student enrollment grew an average of 4 percent annually during the 1996-2006 period.
As of 2006, some 59 percent of U.S. graduate students were female.
Initially, U.Va.’s diversity program will focus on African-American, gay and Hispanic students. “We plan to expand the mentoring institute to include international students, as well as majority students, after the pilot stage of this program,” Evans said.
At the undergraduate level, U.Va. already has a successful peer mentoring program in which third- and fourth-year minority students mentor freshmen and sophomores, she said. African-American students made up 11.4 percent of this year's entering class at the University of Virginia, tying Columbia University in New York City for first place among the nation's top-rated universities in a ranking published by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
"The university has dedicated significant effort and resources toward enhancing graduate student diversity and creating a climate conducive to academic and personal success among students from diverse backgrounds," Evans said.
In addition to the CGS-Peterson’s grant, U.Va. will commit resources to ensure the success and longevity of the mentoring program.
"We anticipate this program will serve as a model for the university and the graduate community in general," said Roseanne Ford, University of Virginia associate vice president for research and graduate studies. "Quality mentoring is a critical component to promoting student success in graduate education, particularly for students from diverse backgrounds."
HUMAN RICHNESS
Like many institutions, the University of Virginia has had to overcome a period in its history before the civil rights era when no minorities were admitted, Evans said. “Then it went through a second phase where a small number of [minority] students were allowed to matriculate. It is now in the third phase, where capacity building is taking place. This means that there is considerable recognition of the value of diversity and inclusiveness and, most [important], of starting a pipeline for sustainability.”
“We value diversity here because it has to do with the human richness, the variety of experiences and backgrounds and perspectives and reasons for learning that distinguish us as people, based on our own backgrounds, our own expectations and our own prior experiences,” said U.Va. President John T. Casteen III.
The Council of Graduate Schools is an organization of nearly 500 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada engaged in graduate education, research and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees.
More information on the Council of Graduate Schools is available on its Web site.
