The alliance, includes four leading West Coast universities – Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA and the California Institute of Technology. With this intellectual firepower, the group was formed to help knock down age-old barriers that have boxed in many people. The effort is funded by a $2.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Together, these institutions are targeting a serious problem in higher education – the lack of underrepresented minority PhD students in the mathematical, physical and computer sciences and in engineering.