NIH diversity programs doubled undergraduates’ odds of getting a Ph.D., 20-year study finds

The path to becoming a scientist is long and twisting, making it difficult to assess whether programs intended to help those careers along are successful.

But on Wednesday, the results of one such study are being published after 20 years of research. The paper in the journal Science Advances found that two diversity-oriented programs supported by the National Institutes of Health doubled the odds that an undergraduate student would earn a Ph.D.

The new data are being released in a political environment much less kind to such programs than when they began three decades ago. Over the past year, both programs, the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) and Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC), were terminated by the Trump administration — as was the funding for the study itself.

“I believe in mentoring, and I believe it works. So I’m not surprised at the finding at all, but I think it’s very important to underscore it in this environment,” said Donna Ginther, an economist who has studied racial funding gaps at the NIH and was not affiliated with the new paper.

The RISE and MARC programs were created in response to the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, which called for the agency to “increase the number of underrepresented minorities engaged in biomedical and behavioral research.” The RISE program provided funding to institutions to create educational and mentoring opportunities for students to prepare them for a career in biomedical research. The MARC program provided two years of funding directly to undergraduates to do research along with professional training.

As the agency began to fund programs to bolster the diversity of the biomedical research workforce, it was unsure how to measure the success of such programs, or how to understand what was helping students.

So, the agency funded a small cohort of researchers to turn the scientific method on the diversity programs, and study them as if they were a medical intervention. “In the early 2000s, as scientist administrators, we wanted to know, ‘Do the programs work?’ but also importantly, ‘How do they work? What is it that they do?’” said Clif Poodry, the former director of the division on workforce development and diversity at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, who funded the study in 2005 .

Sussing out whether the programs have been successful was challenging. While it is easy to track the career trajectory of students who were part of the program, it is difficult to measure what their path would have been without support from the programs because they weren’t average students. Faculty recruiting for the programs looked for students who they thought would be successful in graduate school.

“RISE and MARC directors, they’ve got to cherry pick. They go in and they find the best students, the students that they think are going to succeed, and that their money is going to be best spent on,” said Anna Woodcock, a social psychologist and one of the authors of the new study. “So we have to find these students’ twins, we have to find students who looked exactly like them in terms of motivation, in terms of preparation, in terms of intentions, but didn’t have an opportunity to begin a RISE or MARC program.”

The paper matched students on 11 variables, which included their major, grade point average, their intention to become a scientist, and first-generation status. In total, the study included 608 students in the two diversity programs, and 135 students used as comparisons. The researchers found that 20% of the RISE students and 34% of the MARC students earned a Ph.D., as compared to 10% and 15% in their comparison groups.

The paper does not go into detail about how well students fared in graduate school, their satisfaction in their program, or their publication record. The research team has much of that data, up until 2024. But it’s unclear if, or when, they might be able to analyze it because funding for the research was cut short by the administration.

“The word that comes to mind is heartbreaking,” Woodcock said of the termination. It’s “just absolutely crushing to spend 20 years of a career doing this work to find it cut so abruptly.”

Poodry, who has retired from the NIH, agreed: “When I thought of all the people that we have helped, all the people who have come through and are now in academic positions, research positions, teaching positions, other positions where their opportunities in life are just, just so much better, and that to have that cut back, so that we can’t provide that same support for for next generation of students. I was really very sad.” It’s unclear how many students have participated in the two programs since their inception. One study estimated that the number of students in the MARC program between 1986 and 2013 was around 9,000.

The NIH did not respond to a request for comment on the paper’s findings, or on the reasons for termination of the funding for the two programs.

While i…