ATLANTA — The SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program is celebrating an important milestone — its 300th graduate — at the Southern Regional Education Board’s Annual Meeting here this week.
The 300th Mark Musick Doctoral Scholar graduate is Dr. Kimberly Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who received her doctorate in biomedical engineering at that institution.
The SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program was created in 1993 to ease the acute shortage of minority faculty at U.S. colleges and universities. Although one-third of the nation’s college students are people of color, only about 10 percent of faculty members in higher education institutions in the 16 SREB states are people of color, according to Ansley Abraham, the program’s director.
“Reaching our 300th graduate shows how far we have come in just 13 years,” Abraham said. Almost 80 percent of the program’s graduates are now employed on college and university campuses in 38 states. “Even more remarkable, the program’s retention/graduate rate is nearly 90 percent — more than double the national rate for minority doctoral students,” Abraham noted. The Doctoral Scholars Program’s efforts to be “more than a check and handshake” will continue to grow, Abraham said.
For more information about the program, contact Ansley Abraham, director, at (404) 879-5573, or contact SREB Communications.
SREB, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, advises state education leaders on ways to improve education. SREB was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislatures to help leaders in education and government work cooperatively to advance education and improve the social and economic life of the region. SREB has 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Each is represented by its governor and four gubernatorial appointees.
