In a coordinated stab at one of higher education's most pressing problems, some of the country's largest university systems pledged Wednesday to cut in half the achievement gaps for minority and low-income students on their campuses over the next eight years.

The announcement comes at a time of deep concern that, from everyday undergraduates to the ranks of elite faculty, America's colleges and universities don't look much like the country as a whole.

That point also was underscored Wednesday by a new study tracking the representation of women and minority faculty in elite science departments, which found minorities are making little progress moving up the ranks. Women are faring noticeably better than five years ago, but still trail well behind men.

The 19 public university systems committed to halving by 2015 two key gaps separating low-income and minority students from others: the rates of attending college and of graduating.

Nationally, whites aged 25 to 29 are twice as likely as blacks and three times as likely as Hispanics to have a college degree. And by age 24, high-income students are eight times more likely to have a bachelor's degree than low-income ones.

''Our nation's fastest-growing populations are our nation's lowest achievers,'' said Tom Meredith, Mississippi's commission of higher education. ''So we agreed something had to be done.'' The plans are potentially important for several reasons.

They include the giant state university systems of California, Florida, New York as well as the City University of New York. Overall, the group educates about 2 million undergraduates and about one-third of the nation's low-income and minority four-year college students.

''If they're able to turn their system patterns around, it will have a massive impact,'' said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, a Washington-based group that is partnering in the program.

The systems also have committed to holding themselves accountable by publicly reporting detailed data on their progress, including figures that generally have not been released, such as graduation rates for low-income students.

The question is whether the universities will go beyond the piecemeal approaches like summer recruiting and mentoring programs that have typified higher education's efforts to increase diversity so far. They insisted they would.

Acknowledging the K-12 system isn't entirely to blame, the systems said they would work together to wrestle with fundamental obstacles on their own campuses. Those include rising tuition and living costs, financial aid that is used to lure high-achieving students but doesn't get to the neediest, and reforming the giant, introductory courses where many students are lost.

College leaders added the effort has nothing to do with affirmative action, but rather with hard work to get college-ready students into and through college.

Plans for reaching the goal will vary from state to state. Louisiana, for instance, will work to improve high-demand courses and expand a tuition discount program that encourages students to stay enrolled as they get closer to a degree.

The dearth of women and minorities in top-level science departments is an issue affecting far fewer people, but it, too, has attracted widespread attention. Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers fueled the debate with his infamous 2005 comments that, for the very highest-level jobs, innate ability may partly explain why there are so few women.

Many universities, including Harvard, have taken steps to try to improve conditions and mentoring for women scientists.

In the latest study, sponsored by several foundations, University of Oklahoma Professor Donna Nelson found signs of some gains by women. For instance, at the 100 top-rated programs women account for 12.9 percent of all math faculty, compared to 8.3 percent five years ago. Among physics faculty, they rose from 6.6 percent to 9.1 percent, and in civil engineering from 9.8 percent to 13 percent.

Those and other fields also have seen substantial jumps in the percentage of women earning doctorates which can be the pipeline to professorial jobs.

But underrepresented minorities haven't done as well. In some fields, the proportion of faculty who are black, Hispanic or Native American has actually declined from 3.6 percent to 2.3 percent in the top 50 math programs, and from 4.3 percent to 3.6 percent in electrical engineering.

Why are the numbers of women growing more quickly? Nelson says women are reaching critical mass. When that happens, students have more mentors and growth accelerates.

By contrast, underrepresented minority students in the sciences and engineering are often in departments with at most one or two such faculty members.

There are just three black full professors in the top 100 computer science programs nationally. In chemistry, most of the top 100 programs have no black faculty, and only nine have two or more.

Source: Associated Press