Student Diversity & Academic Excellence

Diversity is a collaborative effort.

Embedded across campus are our strategic partners who help to facilitate diverse contexts for student achievement, while actively promoting the recruitment and retention of students, faculty, and staff of diverse backgrounds, interests and abilities. We invite you to explore these units and programs on our campus that embrace diversity as a foundational tenet of higher education.
You can support campus-wide student diversity and academic excellence by making a gift today.

Flagship Programs

• Center for Educational Opportunity (CEO)
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  The Center for Educational Opportunity is a campus-wide program open to students from various disciplines. We work with over 600 undergraduate students. Our mission is to provide a supportive learning community which fosters an equal opportunity for success in higher education.

• Mercile J. Lee Scholars Program
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  The privately funded Mercile J. Lee Scholars Program increases educational opportunities for academically talented underrepresented ethnic minority – African, Hispanic, Native and Southeast Asian Americans – and culturally disadvantaged undergraduates.

• First Wave
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  The First Wave Spoken Word and Hip Hop Arts Learning Community is a cutting-edge multicultural artistic program for incoming students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bringing together young artists and leaders from across the U.S and beyond, the First Wave Learning Community offers students the opportunity to live, study and create together in a close-knit, dynamic campus community.

• Learning Communities for Institutional Change and Excellence (LCICE)
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  LCICE students learn to interact effectively across all human differences by acquiring the tools to build inclusive working, teaching, and living environments. They develop an understanding of their own social conditioning and practice ways to effectively handle conflict.

• Office of Equity and Diversity (OED)
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  The OED provides campuswide leadership in equity and diversity strategies. It helps campus units to utilize standardized and proactive human-resources processes, follow continuous-improvement principles, engage in collaborative partnerships, and comply with affirmative-action and equal-employment-opportunity requirements.

• PEOPLE Program
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  The UW-Madison PEOPLE Program (Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence) seeks to increase college enrollment and graduation rates of Wisconsin students of color and those who come from an economically disadvantaged background. The program focuses on promoting students’ pursuit of higher education.

• Posse
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  In partnership with the national Posse Foundation, UW-Madison identifies public high school students from Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and New York City who have extraordinary academic and leadership potential and who may be overlooked by the traditional college selection process.