IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/21451.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An Evaluation of The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship's Effect on PhD Production at Non-UNCF Institutions

Author

Listed:
  • Sarah J. Prenovitz
  • Gary R. Cohen
  • Ronald G. Ehrenberg
  • George H. Jakubson

Abstract

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF) was established in 1988 to encourage underrepresented minority (URM) students to pursue PhD study with an eye towards entering academia. Fellows have completed PhDs at high rates relative to other students, but they are selected for their interest and potential, so this reflects both the effects of the program and the abilities of the students themselves. In order to understand one impact of the program we investigate its causal effect - how many of its fellows earned PhDs who would not have done so without the MMUF’s support. In this paper we use restricted access administrative data from the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates to investigate the effect of the MMUF on PhD completions by underrepresented minority students who graduate from participating institutions. We find no evidence that participation in the program causes a statistically significant increase in the PhD production rate of URM students and increases in larger than 0.4 percentage points lie outside a 95% confidence interval using our unweighted baseline estimates. We also do not find evidence that increasing the intensity of the program by adding more fellows increases the PhD production rate, which is particularly notable as this estimate is upward-biased: the number of fellows likely reflects the strength of the candidate pool in a given year.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarah J. Prenovitz & Gary R. Cohen & Ronald G. Ehrenberg & George H. Jakubson, 2015. "An Evaluation of The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship's Effect on PhD Production at Non-UNCF Institutions," NBER Working Papers 21451, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21451
    Note: ED
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21451.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Price, Joshua, 2010. "The effect of instructor race and gender on student persistence in STEM fields," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 901-910, December.
    2. Robert W. Fairlie & Florian Hoffmann & Philip Oreopoulos, 2014. "A Community College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(8), pages 2567-2591, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michèle Müller-Itten & Aniko Öry, 2022. "Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 14(2), pages 402-444, May.
    2. Michèle Müller-Itten & Aniko Ory, 2017. "Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 3012, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mumford, Kevin J. & Patterson, Richard & Yim, Anthony, 2024. "College Course Shutouts," IZA Discussion Papers 16859, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Hani Mansour & Daniel I. Rees & Bryson M. Rintala & Nathan N. Wozny, 2022. "The Effects of Professor Gender on the Postgraduation Outcomes of Female Students," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 75(3), pages 693-715, May.
    3. Oliver, Daniel & Fairlie, Robert & Millhauser, Glenn & Roland, Randa, 2021. "Minority student and teaching assistant interactions in STEM," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    4. Trang Pham & Yung-Yu Tsai, 2024. "The Roles of Faculty Hiring and Retention in Shaping Diversity and Representation in US Higher Education Institutions: A Retrospective and Prospective Analysis from 2001 to 2035," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 65(7), pages 1420-1460, November.
    5. Griffith, Amanda L. & Main, Joyce B., 2019. "First impressions in the classroom: How do class characteristics affect student grades and majors?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 125-137.
    6. Griffith, Amanda L. & Main, Joyce B., 2021. "The role of the teaching assistant: Female role models in the classroom," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    7. Arellano-Bover, Jaime, 2022. "Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 82(1), pages 126-174, March.
    8. Sofia P. Baker & Cory Koedel, 2024. "Diversity trends among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields at selective public universities in the U.S. from 2016 to 2023," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-9, December.
    9. Feld, Jan & Salamanca, Nicolás & Zölitz, Ulf, 2019. "Students are almost as effective as professors in university teaching," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    10. Pieter De Vlieger & Brian Jacob & Kevin Stange, 2018. "Measuring Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education," NBER Chapters, in: Productivity in Higher Education, pages 209-258, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Takao Kato & Yang Song, 2022. "Advising, gender, and performance: Evidence from a university with exogenous adviser–student gender match," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 60(1), pages 121-141, January.
    12. Ellis, Jimmy R. & Gershenson, Seth, 2016. "LATE for the Meeting: Gender, Peer Advising, and College Success," IZA Discussion Papers 9956, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Anthony LokTing Yim, 2023. "How Early Morning Classes Change Academic Trajectories: Evidence from a Natural Experiment," Purdue University Economics Working Papers 1334, Purdue University, Department of Economics.
    14. Karthik Muralidharan & Ketki Sheth, 2016. "Bridging Education Gender Gaps in Developing Countries: The Role of Female Teachers," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 51(2), pages 269-297.
    15. Sun, Yucheng & Zhou, Xianbo, 2022. "The effect of teacher's concurrent administrative position on students' academic outcomes: Evidence and mechanisms," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    16. Ellis, Jimmy R. & Gershenson, Seth, 2020. "Gender, peer advising, and college success," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    17. Shulamit Kahn & Donna Ginther, 2017. "Women and STEM," NBER Working Papers 23525, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Steven Bednar & Dora Gicheva, 2019. "Workplace Support and Diversity in the Market for Public School Teachers," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 14(2), pages 272-297, Spring.
    19. Juan Camilo Cárdenas & Hugo Ñopo & Jorge Luis Castañeda, 2012. "Equidad en la Diferencia: Políticas para la Movilidad Social de Grupos de Identidad. Misión de Movilidad Social y Equidad," Documentos CEDE 10319, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    20. Xueli Wang & Yen Lee & Xiwei Zhu & Ayse Okur Ozdemir, 2022. "Exploring the Relationship Between Community College Students’ Exposure to Math Contextualization and Educational Outcomes," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 63(2), pages 309-336, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21451. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.