Montclair Receives Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Improve Pathways to Graduate Education

Montclair State University, in partnership with NJIT and Saint Peter’s University, has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to better serve all students in their pursuit of graduate education.

Together, the three Hispanic-Serving Institutions will leverage their proximity and unique strengths and differences to better understand barriers and facilitators of student success with a particular focus on minority males, enhance support structures for them and improve retention and completion rates.

The 12-month project, titled “Empowering Minority Men in STEM: A Tri-Campus Hispanic-Serving Initiative,” is led by Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Junius Gonzales and co-principal investigators including:

• Daniel Jean, EdD, associate provost educational opportunity & success programs (Montclair State University)
• John A. Pelesko, PhD, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs (NJIT)
• Sotirios Ziavras, DSc, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of graduate faculty (NJIT)
• Weidong Zhu, PhD, interim vice president, academic affairs (Saint Peter’s University)
• Christina Mortellaro, PhD, assistant vice president for academic affairs and assessment (Saint Peter’s University)

Addressing a Key Challenge for Minority Male Students

The collaborative initiative aims to address an emerging challenge in higher education that shows a drop in men pursuing post-secondary education and graduate programs. These numbers are particularly stark for Latino, Black, and Native American men.

At many institutions, including Montclair, degrees awarded to minority men are flat or declining in comparison to women, where overall enrollments and completed degrees are growing. Retention and graduation rate gaps for these men lag, and in some STEM areas trends are worse. Even at HBCUs, male enrollment is declining.

How the ‘Empowering Minority Men in STEM’ Project Will Function

The tri-campus effort will follow a series of key goals that can help all students succeed in STEM graduate education, including:

• Create an organizational structure with four interdisciplinary teams with members from the three HSIs and key community units.
• Gather existing and new information about Black and Latino males’ entry, retention and completion of STEM graduate education from each institution, and identify multi-level institutional barriers and facilitators.
• Identify how academic program, department and college level barriers can be reduced, and how facilitators can be enhanced into shared capacity building, joint academic support services, academic program improvements or new designs.
• Understand the nature and strength of contextual influences such as family, peers, and community organizations on Black and Latino males’ entry into and success in STEM graduate programs.
• Recommend shared partnership changes in practices, structures, processes and policies to enhance equitable pathways for graduate programs in biology and computer science/data science, with a concrete outcome of a seed project to present to the Sloan Foundation and other prospective funders, including internal prospects at each institution.

The collaboration will also allow for the potential to share resources and create new efficiencies among the participating institutions to further create life-changing opportunities for students.

“The challenges that minority males face in higher education has been an area of focus for the University, as we recognize the importance of improving outcomes for these students – outcomes that can extend to families and communities,” says Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Junius Gonzales. “Collaborating with our partners at NJIT and Saint Peter’s University, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will give us a unique advantage to help create equitable pathways for our future leaders in STEM.”

About the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants primarily to support original research and education related to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. The Foundation believes that these fields—and the scholars and practitioners who work in them—are chief drivers of the nation’s health and prosperity. The Foundation also believes that a reasoned, systematic understanding of the forces of nature and society, when applied inventively and wisely, can lead to a better world for all.