The Foundation's Education and Culture program has three principal goals in higher education: to broaden access to colleges and universities and increase opportunities for minorities and other underrepresented groups; to help faculty achieve excellence in their teaching and scholarship; and to strengthen undergraduate curricula and curricular resources in selected fields.

In the arts, the program assists in developing new works and innovative techniques in the performing arts and promotes diversity by encouraging artists and arts institutions of high quality outside the mainstream. The Foundation also supports the documentation of contemporary performances and major living artists through videotapes, films, and oral history. In developing countries, the Foundation supports the preservation of traditional classical and folk cultures along with efforts to bring these traditions to new life in contemporary creative expression.

ACCESS AND EQUITY

The paucity of blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans on U.S. college and university faculties not only deprives American higher education of a healthy diversity but also tends to discourage minority students from aspiring to college teaching careers. The high cost of graduate education and declining federal fellowship funds are further impediments to minorities who might want to become teachers. To help ease some of these difficulties, the Foundation this year launched a three-year doctoral fellowship program for blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans. The program will be administered by the National Academy of Sciences (nas), which will select forty fellows a year in a national competition. Each fellowship will cover three years of study in the arts and sciences at an institution chosen by the student and will include an annual stipend plus an allowance for tuition and fees. The program will also fund ten awards annually for three years for minority Ph.D. candidates who have completed all the requirements for the degree except the dissertation. The Foundation granted nas $1.2 million for the first year of the program.

nas was also granted $1.6 million to continue a postdoctoral fellowship program designed to expand opportunities for advancement for minority scholars who have already begun academic careers. The program provides a year of research at major universities, scholarly centers, or laboratories. This year's grant supports a seventh cohort of thirty-five fellows, which brings to 245 the number assisted.

According to recent studies, the chance to conduct research as an undergraduate can be a key factor in a student's considering an academic career. A Foundation grant of $196,000 to Cornell University partially funded a new three-year program of summer research fellowships for minority undergraduates at Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, and the Universit of California (Berkeley). Each institution will award ten fellowships a year to sophomores and juniors for eight weeks of research under faculty supervision.

Community colleges are critical entry points to higher education for millions of minority and low-income students. In 1983 the Foundation established the Urban Community College Transfer Opportunities Program (top) to help more of these students continue their studies at four-year institutions. Twenty-four colleges were granted $25,000 each to develop projects that would improve their students' preparation for transfer. The following year, five of these colleges received larger grants to further develop the projects. This year thirteen community colleges (listed on page 55), all of them recipients of top awards in 1983, were awarded a total of $645,000 to strengthen their transfer programs. Activities will include expanded writing programs in courses required for admission to senior colleges; development of core curricula to meet senior college requirements; tutoring by undergraduates who have transferred to senior institutions; academic counseling for high-risk students; expanded contacts between community and senior college faculties; and research to identify factors that improve transfer rates.

To evaluate these grants, the Foundation awarded $125,000 to the Center for the Study of Community Colleges in Los Angeles. For three years the center will examine the transfer rates of students in the colleges receiving the Foundation's grants.