Toward Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education: Constructing Merit and Diversity in PhD Admissions by Julie R. Posselt

For many faculty, a sure sign of fall’s arrival is an uptick in email inquiries from prospective graduate applicants. How faculty interpret those emails—and the implicit judgments they make about the students who send them— is an initial step in the months-long admission process that follows. With graduate degrees increasingly prerequisite to access or promotion in professions that once required only a bachelor’s degree, evaluation and selection for graduate degree programs are key processes of professional and academic gatekeeping.

Until recently, however, graduate admissions has largely escaped the analysis of scholars, aside from research on the predictive validity of the GRE and TOEFL exams. Those studies (and their mixed findings) have supported the cases both for and against reliance on those tests, but have left unexamined key questions about admissions as decision making and faculty members’ role as arbiters of educational opportunity. How do faculty members make sense of and use common criteria in the moment? How do their judgments of students vary from the initial encounters in emails or applications to the hairsplitting among finalists? What are the implications of those judgments for equity and diversity in graduate education and the professions?

The last question is critical. Though there has been considerable progress in the last 40 years toward equitable enrollment in masters programs along lines of race and gender, such pervasive inequities continue in some doctoral fields to the extent that discipline-level data is often suppressed to protect the anonymity of individual students. To better understand the current system of doctoral admissions and why faculty lean on criteria that they know reproduce inequalities, I conducted an ethnographic comparative case study of admissions in ten highly ranked doctoral programs. These programs are located in three well-known universities and represent nine core disciplines. The initial results from this work are published in the August 2014 issue of American Journal of Education, as part of a special issue dedicated to the topic of racial diversity in graduate education, which I guest edited with Professor Liliana Garces of the Pennsylvania State University.

Through a combination of 85 interviews with faculty and the unique perspective obtained by observing admission committee meetings in six of the ten committees, I gained a clear understanding about the conceptions of “merit” that faculty negotiate in doctoral admissions. By following committees over an entire academic year, I observed that merit is plural in meanings and that its signals have an important temporal dimension.

The conventional forms of achievement that count as merit in early rounds of review differ dramatically from the vision that guides final deliberations about whom to admit, in which decision makers see themselves as creating the future of the discipline. Thus, measures and experiences associated with conventional achievement may carry the day in shaping the overall profile of enrolled cohorts, but idiosyncratic judgments that are far afield from academic qualifications determine who ultimately receives offers. For example, among those on the short list, the rare applicant from Malaysia or Mongolia would be judged more interesting—and thus more admissible or desirable—than academically qualified students from nearby China, who apply in droves. In holistic review, opportunities are created and constrained one rating at a time.

[E]quity in the system arguably needs to account for what the “bar” is, where it is set and by whom, which interests it serves, and how considerations about equity and diversity are subtly encouraged or marginalized along the way.

This point highlights how merit’s varied definitions can subtly facilitate or constrain the realization of greater racial and gender diversity in doctoral education. In this group of programs, extremely high GRE scores and high grades from highly selective colleges were central to the ethos of conventional achievement that grounded initial review. Faculty justified this standard to themselves and one another on the basis of shared cultural meanings that they associated with these criteria, such as belonging and intelligence, as well as their convenience in review. Yet reliance on these criteria disproportionately sifted from the pool students whose diversity contributions would have been considered assets in later rounds of review.

Professors’ assessments of applicants were rife with contradictions. For example, many were keen to interpret international students’ GRE scores in the context of national cultures of test preparation, expecting especially high GRE scores of applicants from China. However, many were reluctant to similarly contextualize the scores of domestic applicants within known distributions of GRE scores by gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Students who apply to graduate programs are already a highly selected group and, without care on the part of decision makers, inequalities produced in society and in K-12 and undergraduate education carry forward and are easily reproduced in graduate admissions.

Another contradiction has to do with the consideration of social identities that qualify students for diversity fellowships. Committees and the departments they represent wanted to be known for promoting diversity with excellence; however, only one person in one committee vocally advocated for his committee to weigh diversity contributions in the initial round of review. His suggestion was shot down. As one sociologist in my sample put it, “You have to be above a bar. Then we can ask the diversity question.” In a system where opportunities are allocated to only a few among many who could be successful, equity in the system arguably needs to account for what the “bar” is, where it is set and by whom, which interests it serves, and how considerations about equity and diversity are subtly encouraged or marginalized along the way.

Academia has a long list of opaque evaluation processes, of which graduate admissions is just one. This opacity frustrates not only outsiders who wish to gain admission or assess its fairness, but also faculty and administrators who have little more than the students who enroll as evidence of its efficacy or the need for reform. Key structural elements prevent transparency. Unlike selective undergraduate admissions, evaluation and selection for graduate programs almost always occur in a decentralized manner at the level of the department rather than the school, college, or university. It may be bureaucratized in committee work, but rarely are professors expected to abide by formal, shared evaluation criteria or held accountable for their ratings of individual students or the cohorts whom they admit. Improving graduate admissions will almost certainly need to balance attention to the culture of graduate admissions—exemplified in professors’ cognitive models and inherited assumptions about excellence—with re-evaluating the transparency of admissions’ structural and procedural dimensions.

In addition to the AJE paper, entitled “Toward Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education: Constructing Merit and Diversity in PhD Admissions,” readers interested in these issues may wish to read the full results of the study, which are developed in my forthcoming book, Inside Graduate Admissions, to be published late fall 2015 by Harvard University Press.