Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping

263 Pages·2016·10.07 MB·English

by  Julie R. Posselt

Inside Graduate Admissions
t

Inside Graduate Admissions
Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping
j u l i e r. p o s s e l t
t
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2016
Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Posselt, Julie R.
Inside graduate admissions : merit, diversity, and faculty gatekeeping /
Julie R. Posselt.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-08869-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Universities and colleges— United States— Graduate work— Admission.
2. Discrimination in higher education— United States. 3. Minorities— Education
(Higher)— United States. 4. Universities and colleges— United States— Faculty.
5. Teacher participation in administration— United States. I. Title.
LB2371.4.P67 2015
378.1'55— dc23 2015015782
To Derek and Daniel

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: Gatekeeping Reconsidered 1
one D ecision Making as Deliberative Bureaucracy 20
two Meanings of Merit and Diversity 46
three Disciplinary Logics 74
four Mirror, Mirror 95
five The Search for Intelligent Life 116
six International Students and Ambiguities of
Holistic Review 133
Conclusion: Merit beyond the Mirror 154
Methodological Appendix 179
Notes 193
References 215
Ac know ledg ments 241
Index 243

Preface
It has been about twelve years since I fi rst imagined conducting research
on graduate admissions, and almost exactly fi ve years since I began de-
signing and conducting the study described in this book. In this time span,
I have transitioned from being a college administrator and lecturer, to a
doctoral student, to an assistant professor on the tenure track. My interest
in understanding doctoral admissions from the faculty point of view origi-
nated in a problem of practice—a simple question from an advisee that, at
the time, I was ill equipped to answer. I was new to my job with the Mc-
Nair Scholars Program, and she had just decided to apply to graduate school.
She wanted to learn what reviewers would be looking for in her application,
and I had little more for her than a boilerplate response about strong GRE
scores, letters of recommendation, research experience, and fi t. I promised
to get back to her after reviewing the literature.
It surprised me to discover that the research literature offered little more
detail than I had offered my student. Scholars have been examining under-
graduate admissions from the institutional point of view since the early
1970s, but until this project there had been only one study—a chapter in
Robert Klitgaard’s 1985 text Choosing Elites—t hat offered an empirically
grounded explanation of what was important to admissions decision makers
at the graduate level and why. The seed for a research study on faculty
evaluation in graduate admissions was planted for me that day in 2003,
and it has been a privilege and plea sure to see it come to fruition through