AGEP- Alliances for Graduate and the Professoriate Program

Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP)

Overview

The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP)program seeks to increase significantly the number of Black (African-American), Hispanic and American Indian/Alaskan Native (Native American) students receiving doctoral degrees in all disciplines funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The scarcity of role models and mentors in the professoriate constitutes a significant barrier to producing minority graduates, and NSF is particularly interested in increasing the number of minorities who will enter the professoriate in these disciplines.

Specific objectives of the AGEP Program are to: (1) develop and implement innovative models for recruiting, mentoring, and retaining minority students in doctoral programs and (2) develop effective strategies for identifying and supporting underrepresented minorities who want to pursue academic careers.

The AGEP program also supports a research effort to identify major factors that promote successful transition of minority students from: (1) undergraduate through graduate study (2) course-taking in the early years of the graduate experience to independent research required for completion of a dissertation, and (3) the academic environment to the workplace. To accomplish this objective, the research component will be informed by a portfolio of Federal and private sector efforts in this arena in order to identify factors underlying exemplary as well as unsuccessful efforts.