Baseline Characteristics of the 2015-2019 First Year Student Cohorts of the NIH Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD ) Program

Objective: The biomedical/behavioral sciences lag in the recruitment and ad­vancement of students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. In 2014 the NIH created the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC), a prospective, multi-site study comprising 10 Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) institutional grantees, the National Research Mentor­ing Network (NRMN) and a Coordination and Evaluation Center (CEC). This article describes baseline characteristics of four incoming, first-year student cohorts at the primary BUILD institutions who completed the Higher Education Research Institute, The Freshmen Survey between 2015-2019. These freshmen are the primary student cohorts for longitudinal analyses comparing outcomes of BUILD program participants and non-participants. Design: Baseline description of first-year students entering college at BUILD institu­tions during 2015-2019. Setting: Ten colleges/universities that each received <$7.5mil/yr in NIH Research Project Grants and have high proportions of low-income students. Participants: First-year undergraduate stu­dents who participated in BUILD-sponsored activities and a sample of non-BUILD stu­dents at the same BUILD institutions. A total of 32,963 first-year students were enrolled in the project; 64% were female, 18% His­panic/Latinx, 19% African American/Black, 2% American Indian/Alaska Native and Na­tive Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 17% Asian, and 29% White. Twenty-seven percent were from families with an income <$30,000/yr and 25% were their family’s first generation in college. Planned Outcomes: Primary student outcomes to be evaluated over time include undergraduate biomedical degree comple­tion, entry into/completion of a graduate biomedical degree program, and evidence of excelling in biomedical research and scholarship. Conclusions: The DPC national evaluation has identified a large, longitudinal cohort of students with many from groups histori­cally underrepresented in the biomedical sciences that will inform institutional/ national policy level initiatives to help diversify the biomedical workforce. Ethn Dis. 2020;30(4):681-692; doi:10.18865/ed.30.4.681