Through expansive and reflective discussions over two days, workshop participants arrived at a consensus vision of the model URC. In this model, URCs could be flexibly and innovatively designed in a way that met the needs of the partner institutions. Partners would be expected to come from across the spectrum of stakeholder institutions in undergraduate education and would minimally involve more than one institution. “Institution” in this context is broadly defined to include traditional educational entities anywhere within the K-16 continuum (undergraduate colleges, research universities, comprehensive universities, community and tribal colleges, high schools or other K-12 schools) as well as industry, government agencies and research laboratories, and local communities. Although extensive flexibility in the definition of URCs is recommended, proposals should be required to contain a detailed management plan specifying how inter-institutional relationships will be negotiated and coordinated to the betterment of undergraduate education at all partner institutions.

URCs would ideally be focused on undergraduate students at the freshmen and sophomore levels, with the additional involvement of advanced undergraduates, high school teachers, high school students, etc. as appropriate. In contrast to REU programs, URCs would bring research to the undergraduates instead of bringing the undergraduates to the research. Proposals for URCs would clearly articulate how vertical continuity in chemistry education would be facilitated by the Center through coupling experiences in the URC with other educational opportunities for students prior to and after their involvement in URC activities. Widespread involvement of faculty at participating institutions was viewed as necessary for success of URCs.

URCs would be expected to demonstrate how their presence will influence curricular reform at one or more of the participating institutions, and how this reform will be sustained in the long term. Finally, URCs would be expected to undertake assessment of the benefits and outcomes of the undergraduate research experiences that they provide, and the impact of these experiences on the career paths of the specific target populations of the URC.

Funding for URCs was recommended at a level between approximately $100,000 and $500,000 per year for a duration of between three and five years. Some level of institutional commitment from all partner institutions should be required to ensure success as well as indicate administrative buy-in to the URC concept and mission. Appropriate requests for financial support for student stipends are expected as part of the award as is support for administrative oversight of the Center. Faculty stipends might be appropriate in certain circumstances as necessary incentives for faculty participation.

Despite the compelling vision of URCs described here, participants also articulated the considerable obstacles to successful implementation of the URC concept. First, given the rather stochastic occurrence of existing partnerships of the nature envisioned, mobilization of the undergraduate education community to respond to a call for proposals for such a program may be sluggish at best. The National Science Foundation may wish to include a cycle of planning grants for this program to better enable undergraduate institutions to establish the appropriate partnerships and adequately prepare a competitive and well-conceived proposal. Participants also voiced concern over the feasibility of developing convincing plans for sustaining URCs beyond the duration of the NSF award itself.

Finally, concern over the development of equitable partnerships between institutions of such different size and culture was also expressed, since multi-institutional activities often suffer from “top-down” dynamics that contaminate relationships between large and small institutions. Flexibility in the definition of the lead institution in a Center was encouraged; any institution should be allowed to lead a consortium as long as they demonstrate the ability to provide effective leadership. Another strategy suggested to NSF for mitigating potential problems in equitability between partners within a given consortium was to distribute funds directly to each institution instead of distributing all funds centrally to a single lead institution.