Although many summer undergraduate research programs made the decision to delay, cancel, or suspend their summer experiences in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Morehouse College McNair Scholars Program instead offered a completely virtual summer research experience to 14 Scholars with faculty-led remote research. The program…

American Institutes for Research (AIR) conducted a three-year exploratory case study of four two-year graduate-level bridge programs designed to increase the number of historically underrepresented groups of individuals earning PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This article presents findings from one component of a…

There has been little work done in exploring the variations in admissions practices between different types of physics graduate programs. In this paper, we compared admissions practices in master's programs to a parallel data set collected from doctoral departments to understand the relative importance of particular admission criteria and looked…

Demands for improved educational outcomes in the PreK-12 system in the United States have resulted in educator preparation programs (EPPs) needing to adapt and revise their programs. External pressures and mandates from state and federal governments, accrediting bodies, and other professional organizations have more recently resulted in the…

Despite limiting access to applicants from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, the practice of using hard or soft Graduate Record Examination (GRE) cutoff scores in physics graduate program admissions is still a popular method for reducing the pool of applicants. The present study considers whether the undergraduate institutions of…

In 2007 and 2010, the National Research Council reported that the United States was not producing enough graduates in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive global economy. Despite recent challenges to these findings, one thing remains clear: Underrepresented…

The faculty and student populations in academia are not representative of the diversity in the U.S. population. Thus, research institutions and funding agencies invest significant funds and effort into recruitment and retention programs that focus on increasing the flow of historically underrepresented minorities (URMs) into the science,…

The use and validity of the Graduate Record Examination General Test (GRE) to predict the success of graduate school applicants is heavily debated, especially for its possible impact on the selection of underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering, and math fields. To better identify candidates who would succeed in our program…