Texas Education Consortium for Male Student Success (2013-2016), an initiative of Project MALES
PI: Victor Saenz
The Greater Texas Foundation has awarded Project MALES a new three-year grant ($335,000) to support the Texas Higher Education Consortium for Male Student Success which will begin in June 2013 through August 2016. The purpose of this Consortium is to cultivate a network of higher education institutions (i.e. two-year and four-year institutions) and practitioners over the next three years that will collaborate, share expertise, advance research, leverage resources, and coordinate efforts towards enhancing the participation and success of Hispanic and African American males within Texas colleges and universities. The activities of this Consortium will yield measurable positive results for Hispanic and African American male student success in the areas of college enrollment and degree attainment at each member institution. The primary service delivered by Consortium institutions will be mentoring and other community-building activities. As outlined in our state’s Closing the Gaps framework, enhancing college participation and success for Hispanic and African American males is a critical state policy imperative. This Consortium represents a proactive attempt to leverage collective action on the part of willing higher education institutional partners across the state that are committed to responding to this pressing imperative. It is incumbent upon institutions of higher education to respond decisively and creatively to address this growing crisis.
The Consortium will achieve the following four objectives over the next three years (Summer 2013 – Summer 2016):
Objective 1: Build the Consortium. The initial group will include ten (10) colleges and/or universities committed to enhancing Hispanic and African American male student success. These include:
- The University of Texas at Austin (Lead Institution)
- Austin Community College
- El Paso Community College District
- Lone Star College System
- Palo Alto College
- San Antonio College
- South Texas College
- Tarrant County College District
- Texas State University
- University of North Texas
Objective 2: Annually convene two consortium meetings & one student summit. The Consortium will convene two annual meetings and one annual student summit to build our network and advance programmatic activities and shared evaluation metrics over the first three years.
Objective 3: Incubate research-based male focused programs. A long-term impact of the Consortium will be the galvanization and support of a statewide network of male mentoring programs as models of practice. All Consortium members will implement a male mentoring program (i.e., incubator), or incorporate and appropriately modify an existing male program, at their institutions.
Objective 4: Disseminate findings through resource center & tool-kit. The Consortium will leverage the collective expertise of the Consortium members and develop permanent resources to be maintained by UT Austin as the Consortium’s lead institution. These resources will serve as strategies to broadly disseminate the Consortium’s findings and share best practices through open access technology, annual professional meetings and conferences (outside of this Consortium community) and a monograph publication.
Our primary expected outcome is for the Consortium to serve as a force in encouraging more Texas colleges and universities to implement male-focused student programs in response to the statewide policy imperative that is focused on enhancing the participation and success of Hispanic and African American males. For more information on our Consortium activities, visit: http://ddce.utexas.edu/projectmales/.