Effective minority student recruitment and retention must be viewed and implemented as a long-term process. It involves several critical components:
A. Creating a supportive environment for ethnic minority student training and mentoring
B. Having a committed faculty and appropriate training opportunities and resources
C. Developing creative strategies for identifying talented applicants and encouraging them to apply to the program and
D. Developing a renewable and sustainable critical mass of ethnic minority graduate students.
Following are helpful specific actions for organizing more effective strategies for recruiting ethnic minority students into graduate and professional training programs and for retaining the students in those programs.
A. Create a supportive environment
1. Develop an orientation for prospective students that allows the program to describe its philosophy, research and professional training opportunities and its sensitivity to ethnic minority considerations.
2. Establish ethnic minority student support groups for students currently in the program.
3. Incorporate issues of ethnicity and culture into the courses, research experiences and practicum opportunities for all students.
4. Conduct diversity training workshops for faculty, administrators and students to create a genuine appreciation and respect for cultural diversity.
B. Ensure the presence of committed faculty and other relevant resources
1. Have in the program a minimum number of ethnic minority or other faculty with interest in and a commitment to providing leadership for developing these initiatives.
2. Identify ways to obtain and retain access to ethnic minority populations.
3. Have access to appropriate expertise for working with ethnic minority populations.
4. Address issues of ethnic minority representation in research samples and clinical populations.
5. Have adequate financial support for ethnic minority students.
C. Use creative recruitment strategies
1. Develop an information network that allows the program to identify and track talented ethnic minority students as prospective applicants (e.g., recruiting from such programs as the APA Minority Undergraduate Students of Excellence (MUSE), Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC), Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS), and other ethnic minority research mentoring programs).
2. Develop organized and aggressive recruitment efforts, including well-organized and professionally prepared admissions materials and coordinated outreach efforts that include mailing program brochures and personalized letters to colleagues at other institutions and conducting recruitment trips to undergraduate programs with significant pools of ethnic minority students, etc.
3. Develop other creative ethnic minority focused recruitment activities, such as ethnic minority recruitment or orientation days.
4. Design ethnic minority undergraduate research mentoring programs, including those that are federally funded (e.g., MARC, CORE, MBRS, the new APA/NIGMS project, etc.) or locally developed and funded by the respective university (e.g., UCLA's START program, Summer Research Opportunity Programs, etc.).
D. Develop a stable and continuing ethnic minority graduate student pool
1. Incorporate ethnic minority graduate students as full partners in the development of ethnic minority recruitment and mentoring programs.
2. Have ethnic minority graduate students serve as recruiters for the program.
3. Have ethnic minority graduate students serve as research mentors and advisors to ethnic minority undergraduates.
4. Establish an ethnic minority alumni group, which can provide a valuable resource of trained consultants, clinical supervisors, adjunct faculty, recruiters, etc.
5. Use ethnic minority graduate students as alumni linkages back to their undergraduate universities and programs.
6. Focus special attention and efforts on ethnic minority student retention, graduation and mentoring for academic, research, and professional careers. One of the most important criteria of a program's readiness to train ethnic minority students is its record of success in training ethnic minority students.
