The short, easy to read Evaluation Guide for STEM Graduate Program Leaders provides practical advice and guidelines for tracking and reporting institutional progress toward diversity.  While focused on minorities in graduate studies, the advice offered in the guide (including sources of statistics and best practices for reporting) could be equally applied to tracking diversity for other groups.

” With many U.S. universities working to recruit and support minority graduate students, the AAAS, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, has issued a new guide offering detailed advice and practical tools to help administrators evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts.

“Measuring Diversity: An Evaluation Guide for STEM Graduate Program Leaders” has a simple premise: A high rate of students from underrepresented minority groups leave graduate-level studies before completing advanced degrees, but especially at a time of rising global competition, that represents a significant and costly loss of talent and potential.

“Measuring Diversity” doesn’t tell universities how to keep under-represented minorities in school. Rather, it offers a framework and tools for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of graduate programs. By adapting ideas from the guide, universities also would be able to generate the evaluation data frequently sought by funding organizations, policymakers, and accreditation groups.”

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