Dec. 19, 2002

MOST a success for Sociology department

The UNL Department of Sociology was one of 11 U.S. departments that participated in a program called Minority Opportunities through School Transformation.

The MOST program was an effort to increase diversity and promote excellence and inclusiveness in the field of sociology through systemic, institutional change led by individual departments. The eight-year program, funded by the Ford Foundation, was designed to address racial disparities in higher education.

J. Allen Williams, professor and chair of sociology, said one indication of the program's success at UNL was in the recruitment of students, especially students of color, into the undergraduate and graduate programs. For example, the sociology department's complement of graduating majors increased over the course of the program from 26 in 1993-94 to 46 in 2000-01. During the same years the percentage of minority students graduating with bachelor's degrees in sociology increased from less than 8 percent to 24 percent. Among the 218 majors in 2001-02, 20.6 percent were students of color, compared to the 7.7 percent who were students of color in the total undergraduate population. Recruitment of graduate students was equally successful. In 2001-02, among the 35 graduate students in the department, 34.3 percent were students of color. This compares to 19.6 percent who were students of color among all UNL graduate students.

"What MOST did for us," Williams said, "was to focus our entire faculty's attention on the issue of raising excellence and increasing diversity. We re-thought every aspect of our curriculum and advising with the objective of increasing diversity through strengthening our program for all students."

Schools were selected on a competitive basis, and Nebraska was one of four Ph.D-granting institutions chosen by the American Sociological Association to participate. The others were the University of California at Santa Barbara, Pennsylvania State University and Texas A&M University.