Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping

by Julie Posselt

How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret.“Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion. That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions…While the departments reviewed in the book remain secret, the general process used by elite departments would now appear to be more open as a result of Posselt’s book.”—Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed“Revealing…Provide[s] clear, consistent insights into what admissions committees look for.”—Beryl Lieff Benderly, Science

Genres: Education, Sociology, Nonfiction, Academic, Teaching

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 15, 2016

About the author

Dr. Julie Posselt is an Associate Professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education and was a 2015-2017 National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation postdoctoral research fellow. Rooted in sociological and organizational theory, her research program uses mixed methods to examine institutionalized inequalities in higher education and organizational efforts aimed at reducing inequities and encouraging diversity. She focuses on selective sectors of higher education— graduate education, STEM fields, and elite undergraduate institutions—where longstanding practices and cultural norms are being negotiated to better identify talent and educate students in a changing society. She was the recipient of the 2018 American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award and the 2017 Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Early Career/ Promising Scholar Award.

Her book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (2016, Harvard University Press), was based on an award-winning ethnographic study of faculty judgment in 10 highly ranked doctoral programs in three universities. This work has led to thriving research-practice partnerships with universities, disciplinary societies, graduate schools & programs, and other associations that are re-examining how we evaluate students and scholars for key academic opportunities— and support those who are in the system. Partners include the University of California, American Physics Society, and the Council of Graduate Schools.

Her current scholarship, funded by three grants from the National Science Foundation and one from the Mellon Foundation, examines movements for equity and inclusion in graduate education and the humanistic and physical science disciplines. Posselt recently completed a National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellowship for the first national study of graduate student mental health. This concurrent mixed methods project identified factors associated with depression and anxiety; investigated the roles of discrimination, competitiveness, and faculty support in graduate student wellbeing; and measures disparities within and across academic disciplines.

She has published research in the American Educational Research Journal, Annual Review of Sociology, Research in Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Teachers College Record, Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Her work has been highlighted in Science, The Atlantic, New York Times, Slate, Times Higher Education (UK), Insider Higher Ed, among others. She is a member of the Journal of Higher Education’s and Journal of Diversity in Higher Education's editorial review boards, and is program chair for the 2019 Sociology of Education Association meeting.

Posselt earned her PhD from the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Layne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posselt examines the murky waters of graduate education admissions and shines a light on how current practices may create barriers to building a more diverse pool of doctoral candidates. Spanning across disciplines, Posselt details the ways in which an increasingly competitive market for top students; the pressures of rankings, funding, and other arbiters of prestige; and inherent biases shape the way decisions are made. Most importantly, this volume offers practices institutions can take to incorporate holistic review in their admissions processes and other ways to question conventional understanding of merit to improve equity.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about how graduate admissions work - or fail to work - as planned in the admissions processes in ten leading university doctoral programs - three natural sciences, four humanities, and three social sciences. What is the problem being addressed by the study? It is that while colleges increasingly claim to want to open their faculties to a broader population of women and minority scholars, doctoral programs continue to admit the same homogenous set of students as before, meaning that minorities and women continue to have difficulties in joining college faculties. Put another way, while programs claim to pursue new missions such as diversity and openness, along with traditional missions of quality and merit, in practice the pursuit of new missions is much more limited. The study seeks to identify the extent to which the admissions processes of doctoral programs, despite the good intentions of their members, may be perpetuating an access problem for non traditional students. Despite good intentions, the admissions processes of programs may frustrate the best laid plans of their administrators.

The author is a young professor of education who was able to sit in on the decision processes of ten programs and interview the committee participants. Program and interviewee names are not revealed. The book was published in 2016. It is thus pre-COVID-19, which has turned the academic labor market from TERRIBLE to UNBELIEVABLY TERRIBLE, so it is not up to date, but is still relatively relatively current. Nobody coming out of even a good doctoral program these days is going to have much of a chance at landing a good position. Besides schools are nearly all turning to online educational programs, which are highly scale intensive and thus likely to reduce rather than increase the need for new faculty even after COVID-19 is controlled.

So what did she find?

The results of the study are not surprising but the framework that Professor Posszelt employs to make sense out of them is interesting. The key is that doctoral programs have gotten really popular even while the number of spots available and funded for doctoral students has been stagnant or declining. This means that no matter how open committee members - mostly faculty - are to such goals as equity and diversity - they must wade through dozens and often hundreds of thick and complex application files in order to make the choices they want to make. How does one screen through large numbers of files, test scores, recommendation letters, and personal statements to make one or two or three choices? The result is that bureaucratic screens, such as test scores or GPAs are employed to narrow down the applicant pool to a more manageable number. Doing so may well penalize those applicants with more unusual backgrounds and will go a long way towards replicating traditional population demographics among accepted students.

Get it? The act of simplifying and reducing a large applicant pool works against arriving at a set of accepted students that help address school and department priorities. This is a good way to frame the problem and it certainly rings true with other accounts of doctoral program admissions.

What to do about it? Posselt seems to imply that programs should stop unthinkingly employing screens that end up reproducing prior student populations. So everyone should go back and treat each and every application on its individual merits? Fair enough, but then where does one get the additional faculty and administrator time that would be required? If not that, then what? Here one runs the risk of restarting the problem in the form of a solution. Unfortunately, in the current environment, the problem may be addressed if more applicants see that a Ph.D. is probably not a good option for job training these days. Add to that a reduction in international applicants dues to both economics and politics, and the applicant pool may shrink down to more workable dimensions.

As these books go, this was fairly good and readable.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sociological analysis of graduate admission practices is really important work (I say, from my totally bias-free perch as a graduate admissions administrator whose dissertation was basically sociology). For anyone embedded in graduate admissions, there isn't a lot of 'new' information here, but it serves to confirm anecdotal understanding of faculty decision-making. I found the discussion of the differences between high-consensus and low-consensus fields particularly helpful in understanding how disciplinary characteristics influence admissions decisions. I feel like this book gave me some insights I can distill for my faculty to help them identify patterns in their interactions and decision making around applicants. It's academic writing, so not necessarily gripping, but clearly laid out and well organized.

[Stephen Antczak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work about how graduate admissions works and why diversity is hard to come by in graduate school. Would have given it one more star had she observed and written about an admissions committee in a psychology department.

[Matt Ely · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may not have broad appeal, but it does a great job of investigating the questions it hopes to ask. The author does a great job of mapping out how graduate (in this case, PhD) admissions work from the perspective of the faculty admissions committee. Why do they have so many requirements and which ones really matter? What are the unstated requirements that can sink a potential admission? How are different backgrounds (racial, yes, but national and university pedigree) grappled with (or glossed over)?

Posselt does a good job of seeking to understand the varying motivations of faculty without excusing any biases she observes. She provides a few best practices from the different departments, but in general the text justifies a call for more reflective thinking about the goals of the process and whether its means live up to its stated ends. This will likely be helpful for someone embarking on the process or looking to understand their own experience retroactively. It's very clearly and engagingly written, and it reads quickly. If you're in the narrow band of people inclined to have strong feelings about these kinds of systems, you won't regret checking this out.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is not an examination of the kind of doctoral admissions work I do (I work with different disciplines at a different type of university), but it was really helpful to examine assumptions, expectations, and demonstrated vs. described priorities. This might be too nerve-wracking for applicants, but it's helpful for anyone working in doctoral enrollment.

[Chase · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted more information about holistic admissions process, but recognize that too much detail would lead to "best practices" that are not one size fits all.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an important ethnography of graduate admissions committees, examining how committee members define the qualities they're looking for in the students they accept and how they evaluate applicants for these qualities. Posselt is clear that her descriptions of this process in the book aren't generalizable (the sample size is only ten), but little of what she reports is surprising. Committee members are essentially trying to minimize their risk of dedicating the institution's resources to a student who won't succeed. The gist of the book is that these committees need to wade through a plethora of applications without any reliable indicators of how likely a student is to do well in a PhD program. Her subjects seem pretty aware of the problem: Toward the end of the book, Posselt quotes one professor as having told her that selecting students is a crapshoot. It's hard not to feel sympathy for the people who have to navigate these applications, but it's also hard not to feel intimidated as an applicant.

tldr: