Shirl Donaldson

Development of a Program for Retaining Diverse Students

Abstract: Obviously Purdue is able to recruit minority graduate students merely on reputation and resources available. Retention is appearing to be more of a problem of late. This may be spiraling up from the graduate students to the faculty level. Why? Has this issue been carefully addressed in any exit interviews? Based on informal comments, one may raise several theories on why minority graduate students leave. Most often heard in casual conversations is lack of diversity in the community, feelings of isolation, difficulty in engaging with other minorities because of sparsely populated ethnic areas and general social boredom. This project seeks to develop ways to minimize these effects on minority graduate students enrolled at Purdue and encourage their long term involvement with this illustrious university. These positively affected graduates also become models of success when courting the next group of potential students.