Increasing diversity, access and success of students and faculty in the geosciences has been a sustained priority of the geoscience education community over recent decades. The collected experiences of these programs has allowed the development of overarching models that explain and predict the operational factors and components critical to the attraction and success of underrepresented minorities in the geosciences. This roundtable discussion will highlight a few recently published models of access and success in the geosciences, including multicontext theory, macrosystems models, Jolly trilogy model, and input-environment-output models. This session will explore the particular strengths and insights offered by these approaches and how individual departments and geoscience programs can use them to enhance program outcomes.