UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 27, Page 1
April 13, 1995
RISE program receives part of $5 million group grant

     The Resources to Insure Successful Engineers (RISE) program at
the University is part of a regional consortium of eight institutions
that has won a $5 million Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP)
grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
     The RISE program is one of the nation's oldest and most
successful student support programs for ethnic minorities who are
underrepresented in engineering.
     The five-year grant, which requires the eight participating
institutions to match the award money, will net about $375,000 from
NSF for RISE at Delaware.
     Each institution will use the grant money in different ways. At
UD, the grant will support a full-time coordinator of RISE special
projects; a comprehensive tutorial program for RISE students;
continued development of a student mentoring program, currently funded
by the William Penn Foundation; and graduate-level counselors who will
assist RISE students in academic and professional development.
     The alliance is designed to build upon the strengths of each of
the member institutions, since each participant has strong areas of
expertise and special student demographics. Delaware, for example,
brings two critical components to the partnership-proven student
support services, such as tutorial and mentoring programs, and a
strong recent history of undergraduate student research initiatives.
     There will be a structured sharing of best practices among
members of the alliance in the academic areas identified in the grant,
including academic enrichment, outreach and transition activities, and
industry involvement..
     The University's RISE program is directed by Michael L. Vaughan,
assistant dean of the College of Engineering, which has a large
African-American population and a growing enrollment of Latino
students.
     Over the past decade, there has been a concerted nationwide
effort to increase the number of African-American, Hispanic-American
and Native American students entering careers in science, engineering
and mathematics. In 1979, the National Action Council for Minorities
in Engineering (NACME) reported that 4 percent of engineering degrees
awarded nationwide went to underrepresented ethnic minority students.
By 1990, the percentage had doubled to 8 percent. At Delaware over the
same time, the percentage increased from 3 percent to 13.6 percent.
     While those numbers are encouraging, Vaughan said, surveys
forecast that, by the year 2000, the nation will have a shortfall of
individuals trained in engineering and the sciences to meet the needs
of the ethnically diverse work force.
     For Vaughan, this is an issue of global importance.
     "RISE and similar programs exist to address a workforce dilemma
rather than to 'do the right thing' for certain ethnic groups," he
said. "The funding that we receive from corporations, the government
and foundations, such as this award from NSF, is seed money to
investigate solutions to a very serious workforce issue that threatens
our global economic and technical competitiveness as a nation. We, as
educators, must be the responsible stewards of our total intellectual
human resource.
      "RISE and similar programs focus on the examination and
mitigation of issues that cause the attrition of talented students,"
Vaughan said. "RISE provides an opportunity for students to access
what they potentially need to enhance their undergraduate education.
The end result is that we produce students who have the skills needed
to be competitive in the workforce and/or in the graduate arena and
who have the technical insight and confidence to allow them to make a
difference."
     The UD RISE program was founded in 1972 to affect positively the
engineering education of underrepresented ethnic minority students,
both in terms of recruitment and retention. RISE has evolved over the
past two decades to become one of the nation's most effective programs
of its kind.
     Other members of the regional consortium are Cheyney, Delaware
State, Drexel, Lincoln and Temple universities, the Community College
of Philadelphia, PATH/PRISM (an education enhancement organization)
and the University of Pennsylvania.
                                                            -Skip Cook