At NCSU, the enrollment of science, technology, engineering, and math by underrepresented minority graduate students increased by 67% from 1994 to 2003.

History

The Alliances for Graduate Education in the Professoriate Program (AGEP) combined two existing Minority Graduate Education (MGE) projects (awarded by the National Science Foundation [NSF] in 1999) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and the joint North Carolina State University (NCSU)/North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) project. Immediately after the MGE grants were awarded, the three schools formed an alliance; one year later, they led the formation of an alliance involving all NSF – Human Resource Directorate (HRD) supported underrepresented minorities initiative projects in North Carolina. It is now called the North Carolina Alliance to Create Opportunity through Education (NC OPT-ED). To support the initial administration of NC OPT-ED, NSF awarded supplemental funds in 2001 in a NCSU/NC A&T grant.

The logic behind the development of NC OPT-ED is to connect programs with common goals in a much broader fashion in order to advance the participation of underrepresented minority (URM) students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. These connections would also serve to support the efforts of each of the individual programs. The key is the participation of programs from the education spectrum ranging from middle school to doctoral programs. This framework allows a clear pathway to be evident so that students in the middle school programs receive guidance and support all the way through completion of the Ph.D.

The NC OPT-ED partnership will continue to have a broad impact across multiple educational levels in the state of North Carolina, the southeast, and—with the production of doctoral recipients—the nation. In addition to the collaborations between NC A&T, NCSU and UNC-CH, the NC OPT-ED partnership will continue to strengthen alliances with all other NSF-supported URM initiative projects in North Carolina. It will integrate the resources of the existing programs and build a broader alliance to serve URM students.

The population groups to be emphasized are African-Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.