A Preliminary Analysis of Federal Funding Rates for Tribal College(s) and Unviersity Programs (TCUPs)

American Indians represent almost 2% of the United States population In relation to science, 41% of the population 25 and older has a bachelor’s degree in science and engineering. Because lack of funding can lead to underdeveloped science and engineering program s at schools and funding opportunities for Tribal Colleges and Universities are rare,  I suspected that funding opportunities must be increasingly hard to come by and rarely taken advantage of.  By completing a comprehensive analysis on the funded projects through award databases such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, I was able to review awarded projects that had been proposed by Tribal Colleges and Universities. Preliminary results suggest:  1) that the Principal Investigators are non-American Indian or Alaska Native 2) that Tribal Colleges and Universities not competitive enough to apply for funding sources not specified for the type of institutions. These data suggests additional efforts must be made in order to increase the amount of Native Americans in undergraduate STEM fields.