The Leadership Alliance: Twenty Years of Developing a Diverse Research Workforce

The Leadership Alliance is a national academic consortium currently comprising 32 academic institutions including Ivy League and major-research and minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). For 2 decades these institutions have worked collaboratively to train, mentor, and support underrepresented minority students from undergraduate through advanced graduate training programs. Effectively bridging the research capacity of Ivy League and leading research institutions with minority talent at HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, the Alliance has leveraged its long-standing partnership to develop and implement the Summer Research Early Identification Program (SR-EIP) and the Leadership Alliance National Symposium (LANS), proven programs for diversifying the pipeline of scholars. The objectives of this descriptive study are to demonstrate (a) the impact of these programs on student participants' undergraduate learning experience, and (b) the subsequent academic and career outcomes that occur for program participants. Discussion of the data sources and analysis approaches used in this study follow a description of the SR-EIP/LANS program participants. The outcome data demonstrate that the Alliance has become a nationally established pipeline program that successfully mentors underrepresented students along the entire academic pathway to produce scholars and researchers poised to contribute to a competitive 21st-century workforce.