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Home > Forums > Interest Groups > HBCU Recruits! Edit Settings  |  Search Forums Five HBCUs Receive Grant for Science Education Posted on 04-22-2008 klg14 Hawthorne, CA Hampton University, Morehouse College, North Carolina Central University, Oakwood College, & Spelman College. All 48 schools: HHMI News: College Grants 2008 The Chronicle of Higher Education Tuesday, April 22, 2008 $60-Million in Grants to Help 48 Colleges Improve Science Teaching By JEFFREY BRAINARD The Chronicle of Higher Education Spelman College , in Atlanta, will film a documentary movie about its students who successfully pursued degrees and careers in science. The University of Texas-Pan American will use a school bus converted into a mobile science lab to scour rural Texas for promising middle-school students. Those are among an array of new projects, announced today by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to improve education in the biological sciences at undergraduate institutions. The institute is providing a total of $60-million over four years to 48 colleges and universities. Howard Hughes gives a new batch of the awards every four years, and the latest crop is the largest in more than a decade and is more diverse than ever, the institute said. More than a quarter of the institutions had never before received support from the institute, a philanthropy that is the largest private supporter of science education in America. "Liberal arts colleges—particularly some of our grantee institutions—have long been successful in educating future scientists," said Thomas R. Cech, president of Howard Hughes. Mr. Cech, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, is himself a graduate of one of them, Grinnell College, in Iowa, which happens to be among this year's recipients. Finding and Keeping Science Students In fact, students from liberal-arts colleges go on to graduate school in the sciences at disproportionately high rates. Science educators attribute that pattern to the smaller classes and more personalized instruction at those institutions compared with the large research universities that award a majority of bachelor's degrees in the sciences. The 48 grantees are a mix of elite and less-well-known private colleges, minority-serving institutions, and nonresearch universities serving large numbers of immigrant students. Howard Hughes selected them after inviting applications last year from 224 institutions with a track record of preparing students for research. The winners, who were picked from among 192 applicants , will each get from $700,000 to $1.6-million over the four-year period. Many of the projects will focus on recruiting students from minority groups that are underrepresented among scientists. Others will allow students to conduct hands-on, in-depth laboratory-research projects. A big push is on to retain students during and after their freshman years, "when we lose so many of them," said Peter J. Bruns, vice president for grants and special programs at Howard Hughes. All of those steps have been cited by experts as key to attracting adequate numbers of the most-talented students to study science. The institute also wants the projects developed with its grants to serve as models to be adapted at peer institutions—a goal that has proved hard to achieve broadly in higher education (The Chronicle, August 3, 2007). To help foster such modeling, the institute formed last fall a new project, the Science Education Alliance. One of its first efforts, announced in December, will introduce a new, yearlong freshman course in genomics at 12 institutions, six of them undergraduate-serving and the other six research-intensive. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education   [Reply] Page 1 of 1 1 Reply To Topic In order to post a response to this topic, please login below or click here to signup. Email Address: Password: Page 1 of 1 1 Home > Forums > Interest Groups > HBCU Recruits! Edit Profile Post Content Sponsored Content Create an Ad Follow Us! Link To Us! Do you have a website? Link to HBCU Connect! Have a Question? Call Us Direct @ 877.864.4446

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