WASHINGTON — The first long-term study tracking underrepresented minority students at institutions participating in a national engineering diversity consortium found an 84.1 percent retention rate among those students in the consortium’s scholarship program.
This finding has come as good news to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), Inc. whose release of its “NACME Scholars Retention and Graduation Report Cohort Years 2004 — Summer 2012” study was one of the highlights of the group’s national meeting on Tuesday in Washington.
Christopher Smith, the director of research and evaluation at NACME, Inc., told roughly 100 meeting attendees that, while additional research is needed to produce six-year graduation rates of NACME Scholars, the newly-released research represents promise for the organization’s goal that its scholars achieve an 80 percent graduation rate. He noted that the study found overall that the six-year graduation rate of underrepresented minorities (URM) is 39.3 percent at 23 NACME Partner Institutions, while the rate for non-underrepresented minority students is 60.3 percent.
“The numbers are a bit more encouraging for the NACME Scholar. … We see retention and graduation rate for NACME Scholars — [meaning] those who graduated and those who are still enrolled — is 84.1 percent of our NACME Scholars, and this is across 29 schools,” Smith said.
“We’re very encouraged by this, and the goal for all of our NACME Scholars at each of our partnering institutions is to eventually graduate 80 percent of them. So this shows that this is certainly possible,” he noted. “And again, going forward, we’re going to calculate the six-year graduation rate for these scholars … so that’s the next part of our research.”
Smith told Diverse that with the launch of their Block Grant Program in 2003, NACME began collecting long-term retention and graduation data, which has made the recent study possible. Under the Block Grant Program, participating schools receive a five-year grant whose proceeds are distributed directly to students as scholarships. Scholarship students are required to have a minimum grade point average of 2.5., according to NACME.
