Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Our goal is to make high quality learning, education and training ,available anytime and anywhere, for those motivated to seek it.

Today nearly 4 million learners take at least one course online from an accredited institution through the Sloan teaching style (ALN), a number that continues to increase in the range of 20% per year. Most chief academic officers, and the number increases annually, now believe online learning is equivalent to traditional learning, and improving. Learners tell us they are benefiting from ALN education. The Sloan ALN Consortium (Sloan-C at www.sloan-c.org), with its theme of Quality with Scale and Breadth, and its promotion of quality practices and metrics, is a large contributor to the robust ALN growth rate through its programs in online education, speakers/consultants, publications, workshops and an annual conference that is likely to draw 1000 attendees this year. Major member institutions of Sloan-C, such as the state universities of New York, Illinois, Maryland, Washington, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, all Sloan grantees, also provide important impetus to ALN growth. Last year for instance, SUNY launched the first ever engineering undergraduate degree. In 2005 , the Sloan-C demonstrated its “quick-reaction” capability by seeking and receiving a $1.1 million Sloan grant, and assembling an operating virtual university within one week following Hurricane Katrina, that offered advising and nearly 1500 online courses, tuition-free, from 175 institutions, to all students displaced by the damage and flooding. Over 2000 enrolled.

These successes are enormously gratifying, yet our program goal is not attained. Although 20% of all current students at degree-granting institutions now take at least one ALN course, only about 6 or 7 percent of higher education credits earned, are in ALN, and many disciplines remain unrepresented. We believe there is plenty of unmet demand. Our strategy going forward is to maintain the ALN growth rate, (1) by funding a few institutions to demonstrate a complete package of educational offerings and associated local advertising for “near-campus” learners through ALN and “blended” (part-ALN) courses, (2) by creating mechanisms which encourage academic leaders (presidents, chancellors and provosts) to take into account options afforded by online education, in their strategic planning, (3) by continuing our efforts to establish a larger ALN presence in minority institutions, and (4) by seeking partnerships with Federal and state governments to institute large-scale ALN implementations for worker re-training. We will support grants to a few outstanding exemplars for each category.

On the non-academic side, we will accelerate our ongoing efforts, to strengthen links we have been able to form, between academic ALN and corporate e-Learning. We also plan limited grant support for our small project in New Jersey which demonstrated the power of online training for low-wage adults. Through our Rutgers University project, we are now supporting other state programs to add online components, and generate a national trend.

Information About Careers
A. Frank Mayadas, Program Director

Information About Careers The goal of this program is to provide realistic information about worklife in science and engineering careers. Initial career decisions are made without realistic information about life in science -based professions. The Sloan Career Cornerstone Series was initiated to remedy this situation It began as a series of videotapes and CD-ROMS, featuring career profiles in 9 disciplines, which were distributed to high school and college career centers.

In 2003 the Cornerstone web-site (www.careercornerstone.org), which presented the original Cornerstone materials to a larger audience, free of charge and in a more accessible medium, came into existence. Since then, new disciplines in the science, math and technology areas, have continuously been added. Currently, the site features career information on 135 disciplines. An external advisory board assists in making the site better known and with advice on career profiles.

The idea is to make the site known and usable to high school and college career counselors, department chairs and deans, who refer students to it. The site currently experiences nearly 400,000 page views, 80,000 PDF downloads and 80,000 site visitors, all per month. Portions of Cornerstone are also available from the iTunes catalog as Pod-casts.. Surveys and informal feed-back from career counselors indicates Cornerstone fulfills a special niche by providing materials and information not available elsewhere,

Going forward, we will continue to adding additional disciplines, probably reaching 150 or so by the end of 2008. We will also add disciplines available in 2-year (Associates) degree programs.

Professional Science Master's Degrees
Michael Teitelbaum, Vice President
The goal of this program is to bring into being a new type of master's degree in the sciences that equips people for work outside academia. We seek to spur a significant movement in this direction through the support of exemplary efforts at selected US universities. Our focus is on Professional Science Master's degrees, heavily oriented toward coursework, requiring a full-time student two years to obtain. Success of these types of programs requires that they are aligned with the interests of both the faculty and students. Faculty must be committed and enthusiastic about the new programs. Preliminary indications show that strong job markets exist for the graduates.

Foundation grants are likely to encourage three forms of Professional Science Master's degrees:

Graduate schools in arts and sciences have proven a tremendous machine for producing research. Yet, they are peculiarly unhooked from the marketplace.

The very long period now required for a Ph.D in much of science and doubts about the suitability of present graduate training for non-academic jobs all converge on the idea that graduate schools of arts and sciences might consider a "different" kind of graduate degree, in addition to the Ph.D. The difficult labor markets faced by many new Ph.D's and postdocs and the growth of part-time and adjunct faculty strengthen the view that the Ph.D degree might not be the best final degree for many science-trained professionals. The fact that non-completion of doctoral degrees is reported to be as high as 50% (though this is a "soft" estimate that needs to be improved) further suggests a mismatch between career options and career choices in the sciences.

A Sloan Foundation grant to the Council of Graduate Schools has stimulated about 30 new Professional Science Master’s degrees at “Master’s-focused” universities. Other Trustee grants have been provided to improve data on science graduate education at the master’s level, engage minority-serving institutions in PSM initiatives, support outreach efforts, create a statewide PSM initiative in the large North Carolina system, and bring the PSM initiative to the attention of State legislatures and governors’ advisors advisors on workforce and economic development.

We are mindful of the difficulty of making a national impact on the basis of "model" programs. Still, we hope that supporting a small number of universities to develop these programs, which must be self-sustaining largely on the basis of tuition, like MBA programs, will have a substantial effect. Today more than 50 universities have been supported to establish more than 100 degree programs.

For information about all Sloan-supported MS programs, and for news about the growth of master's degrees in sciences, visit the web site of the Sloan Science Master's Outreach Initiative, http://www.sciencemasters.com/.

In 2000 and in 2001, the Foundation invited proposals for new "single-track" Professional Master's Degrees in Bioinformatics, a rapidly-growing scientific field that offers very attractive research careers for those who combine graduate-level education in both molecular biology and computational sciences. On the basis of peer-reviewed assessment of the proposals submitted, the Foundation has provided grants to 15 U.S. university campuses. A full listing of these programs, and contact information for their directors, is available.

The goal of our program is to establish and assemble the basic facts about the U.S. labor market and workforce in science and engineering, including temporary workers, graduate students, postdocs, and part-time/adjunct faculty. There are many signs of problems: simultaneous claims of both shortages and surpluses, low retention rates in undergraduate and graduate programs, increasing time to degree, movements to unionize graduate students, and rapid growth in postdoc numbers.

Until recently research efforts were very limited and highly scattered. During 2001 the Foundation supported the creation of a new national network of leading labor economists on this subject organized by the National Bureau of Economic
Research, which initiated its activities in early 2002.

Our plan has been to support the development of objective data and analyses, and to attract the research attention of high-quality researchers to this under-researched area. Beginning in 2002, the Sloan-supported Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP) of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has assembled a strong national network of labor economists, scientists, mathematicians, policy experts, and historians, who have been undertaking and publishing evidence-based analyses of the U.S. science and engineering workforce and providing expert advice to government agencies, industry and academia. Beginning in September 2006 this project will expand into a joint program between NBER, Harvard University, and other Boston-area universities. Further information on this NBER Research Network may be found at: http://www.nber.org/~sewp/.

In 2003, a small grant to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology provided support for an update of a set of reports originally published in 1999, that provided for the first time credible and authoritative statistics on the state of the information technology (IT) workforce in the United States. The new report, The Outlook in 2003 for Information Technology Workers in the USA by Richard Ellis and B. Lindsay Lowell , provides original and updated information regarding the effects of the current recession in the IT sector, as well as trends in immigration, higher education, and outsourcing. The report was released during a Congressional "Breakfast Bytes" briefing on Capitol Hill on September 17, 2003. The above reports and further information are available at http://www.cpst.org/ITWF_Report.cfm.

A later grant now is producing novel data-based portraits of the U.S. science/engineering workforce by tapping existing data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that have not previously been used for this purpose. A second project, proposed by the Population Reference Bureau (www.prb.org), is in the beginning stages of an effort to create special tabulations from the new American Community Survey designed to provide much more detailed information on U.S. scientists and engineers than has previously been available.

A 2003 grant to the RAND Corporation provided partial support for a December 2003 workshop addressing which data and analytic methods would be needed for informed assessment of future claims of "shortages" or "surpluses" in the US science and engineering workforce. This project was supported jointly with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. A comprehensive report on this workshop, "The U.S. Scientific and Technical Workforce: Improving Data for Decisionmaking”, edited by Terrence K. Kelly, William P. Butz, Stephen Carroll, David M. Adamson, Gabrielle Bloom, is available at http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF194/

We are also interested in improving knowledge about the attractiveness of Ph.D. training programs, postdocs, and careers in science and engineering. During 2001 the Foundation supported an experimental effort to use cutting-edge web survey techniques to tap the views of Ph.D. students and recent graduates. This experiment proved to be unusually successful, with over 32,000 respondents completing the questionnaire.

Based upon this positive experience, in 2003 the Foundation supported a proposal from Sigma Xi for development and implementation of the Sigma Xi Postdoctoral Survey Project. The goal of this project is to improve the training and research experiences of postdoctoral researchers by providing a better understanding of the factors that contribute to productive postdoctoral experiences and by enabling institutions to benchmark their postdoctoral policies and practices against those of their peer institutions. In 2005 the Sigma Xi project published its report Doctors without Orders: Postdoc Survey Highlights, by Geoff Davis. This report was published in American Scientist 93(3, supplement). It and additional materials is available online at http://postdoc.sigmaxi.org/results/

In 2002, the Foundation provided support to the American Association for the Advancement of Science for initiation of a new National Postdoctoral Association (NPA), which held its inaugural National Meeting in Berkeley, CA in March 2003. The NPA, led by an impressive leadership of mature young scientists, has since become quite visible and influential. Its advice on improving the postdoctoral experience has been actively sought by leaders of science funding agencies and higher education organizations. Further information may be obtained at: http://www.nationalpostdoc.org/.

We remain interested in other ideas that can provide informed and objective attention to these issues. In particular, we will continue to assess the potential of web-based survey technologies to enhance our knowledge, and will look for thoughtful approaches to understand the apparently low retention rates in scientific fields.

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