~ Pergamon Studies in Educational Evaluation, Vol.22, No. 3, pp. 245-261, 1996 Copyright © 1996ElsevierScienceLtd Printed in GreatBritain.All rightsreserved 0191-491X/96 $15.00 + 0.00 S0191-491X(96)00014-4 A TALENT DEVELOPMENT APPROACH TO DETERMINING THE GOALS OF A UNIVERSITY MINORITY RETENTION PROGRAM Daniel G. Solorzano Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Introduction Most people who evaluate social programs know very little about minority program participants' world view, the appropriateness of program interventions in meeting their needs, or the programs' personal consequences for these clients (Madison, 1992, p. 35). How much do we know about the minority I students' view of student retention programs? Anna-Marie Madison (1992) presents a formidable challenge to those who hope to better understand the retention and graduation of Students of Color from US universities. In higher education today, some of the more significant research and programmatic problems are the access, retention and graduation of minority students. These issues become even more crucial as the minority college student population increases (Carter & Wilson, 1993; Ward & Cross, 1989). One of the vehicles colleges and universities use to address these problems are student retention programs. The ability to show the retention program's impact on minority students is critical when special programs of this type are threatened by financial cutbacks and/or termination. However, retention programs' effectiveness is not easily measured because many of these programs in higher education do not have the means of tracking students who use their services (Dolence, 1991; Howard & Rogers, 1991; Orbach, 1994; Ward & Cross, 1989). I was given the task of designing a data retrieval system whereby a major research University 2 would be able to keep track of the students who participate in one of the largest retention Programs 3 in the United States.