Inside Graduate Admissions

Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping

Julie R. Posselt

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674984042, 9780674088696
• eBook ISBN: 9780674915664
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

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

Introduction

Gatekeeping Reconsidered

FOR THREE HOURS the philosophy admissions committee had been working in a cramped storage room that doubled as their meeting space. They had been discussing applicants on their short list, one by one, but had reached a point of deadlock over who should ultimately receive offers. Breaking a long silence that betrayed the group’s exhaustion, their administrative assistant, Leon,¹ spoke up for the first time. He noted that agreeing to admit everyone who received an average rating of 1.8 or higher would give them their desired cohort size: the lucky 13. Their work would be done. No one jumped at the idea, but the committee chair, Liana, and a senior professor, Olivia, expressed their support. Another senior professor, Gerald, wasn’t so sure.

“People seem to be very confident about the line where admissible leaves off and inadmissible picks up,” he said. “I have a hard time drawing lines because wherever we draw it, it’s going to look arbitrary.”

Olivia emphatically responded, “Well, it is an artificial line!”

Continuing to push, Leon noted that drawing the line at a rating of 2.4 would finish the job even more quickly by giving them the optimal number of admitted and wait-listed students. A long pause and a few sighs and shoulder shrugs later, they agreed to use this threshold and started packing up.²

There is a story behind every statistic—including the lucky 13, the 2.4 rating, and the 18 percent of applicants admitted to research doctoral programs nationally.³ This book tells the story of how faculty in ten top-ranked doctoral programs draw the almost imperceptibly fine line between those whom they admit and those whom they reject. Two years of observing and interviewing graduate admissions committees in core academic disciplines—astrophysics, biology, classics, economics, linguistics, philosophy, physics, political science, sociology—gave me a unique window into the evaluation and selection processes that go into graduate admissions. My research revealed faculty members’ nebulous, shifting ideals about student quality; how departmental, disciplinary, and personal priorities are woven into judgments of admissibility; and the implications of it all for equity and the health of the academy.

Changes in society, the applicant pool, and the labor market have fundamentally altered the markets for graduate education and for people with graduate degrees, yet the criteria associated with admission to degree programs have changed little. Of the three strongest determinants of access to graduate education—college grades, Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, and the reputation of a student’s undergraduate institution—the latter two are part of a conventional notion of student quality that fails on at least two counts.⁴ GRE scores and college prestige fail to reliably predict whether a student will complete the PhD, and disproportionately exclude some of the very groups whom our mission statements and websites claim we wish to attract. What is more, the structure of the academy in the twenty-first century will not sustain many of the positions that admissions decision makers themselves hold...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Gatekeeping Reconsidered
• One. Decision Making as Deliberative Bureaucracy
• Two. Meanings of Merit and Diversity
• Three. Disciplinary Logics
• Four. Mirror, Mirror
• Five. The Search for Intelligent Life
• Six. International Students and Ambiguities of Holistic Review
• Conclusion: Merit beyond the Mirror
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index