Posselt’s team awarded $1.2M grant to increase equity in grad admissions

Posselt’s team awarded $1.2M grant to increase equity in grad admissions

pulliasadmin College access, Equity & Diversity

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1,195,000 grant for a project to increase equity in graduate admissions to a team of researchers from USC, UC Davis, and UCLA. Serving as the project’s advisor and assessment lead is Assistant Professor Julie Posselt, researcher at USC Rossier’s Pullias Center for Higher Education and nationally-recognized expert on graduate admissions.

Called Alliance for Multicampus, Inclusive Graduate Admissions (AMIGA), this 4.5-year project will develop holistic review methods for graduate admissions. Holistic review is a method of evaluating applicants on a wide range of attributes and skills, instead of relying solely on numbers-based academic measures such as GRE scores, which often have the effect of weeding out women and members of underrepresented minority groups.

The AMIGA project will collaborate with 16 graduate programs at UC Davis and UCLA, with the goal to increase diversity at the graduate level within — and beyond — the UC system. The project team will design and deliver faculty development modules on inclusive admissions and initiate faculty-to-faculty training, as well as host two forums to disseminate inclusive graduate education scholarship and practices.

Posselt’s role will be to coordinate two project forums as well as to collect and analyze data to track progress toward establishing sustainable, scalable systems for holistic graduate admissions. Her collaborators include two researchers from UC Davis — principal investigator Prasant Mohapatra and co-principal investigator Josephine Moreno — and two from UCLA, Robin Garrell and Norma Mendoza-Denton, both co-principal investigators.

Posselt’s book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (Harvard UP, 2016), sheds light on some of the problems with current grad school admissions practices and recommends holistic methods for evaluating would-be students.

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Photo: USC first generation student Natalie Reyes attends a breakout session during the first generation summit, Friday, February 3, 2017. (Photo by Gus Ruelas)