Equity in Graduate Education: Organizing for Equity
“The Equity in Graduate Education Consortium has helped me to expand my connections with scholars and practitioners committed to positively influencing equity-based systemic change within graduate education. It is an invaluable community of thought and action partners who provide me with mutual mentoring opportunities having immediate and meaningful implications to my work within and beyond Cornell.”
— Sara Xayarath Hernandez
Associate Dean for Inclusion and Student & Faculty Engagement, Cornell University Graduate School
The Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, headquartered in the Pullias Center, enables capacity building and systemic change for equity and inclusion in graduate education nationwide. It serves as a lab for community-inspired research on these issues, and it provides training on evidence-based, equity-minded admissions, recruitment, and mentoring practices; coaching for departments and other leaders in institutional change; and community and support as leaders develop infrastructure for faculty development.
It started as a successful pilot in 2017 with USC and five University of California campuses, and now includes 13 member universities and 84 affiliated PhD programs. Six years later, an external evaluation led by Dr. Kelly Rosinger from Penn State University found that these partner programs:
- Adopted inclusive recruitment and admissions practices,
- That they intend to sustain these changes, and
- That they significantly increased the percentage of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other racially minoritized applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students.
There are lessons for any change-maker embedded in members’ experiences, as there are in Consortium leaders’ experiences scaling up and creating a new track on equity in mentoring and wellbeing. Unlearning myths about merit and excellence has stretched members’ paradigms for practice, laying a stronger foundation for structural and cultural change. Applying their learning about equity-minded mentoring is now stretching members to think and act organizationally in an area that is usually treated as a matter of individual practice.
Stretching paradigms for practice
Partners during the pilot contributed to the first major policy implementation study of holistic admissions. The findings of this study, which was led by a group of Pullias faculty, graduate students, and Consortium members, are timely given that the project’s admissions model was developed to be compliant with Proposition 209. California’s ban on race-conscious admissions has parameters that may soon become federal standards.
Although programs were identified as partners in part by their change readiness, policy implementation was entangled with change management in important ways. Posselt, Southern, Hernandez, Desir, Alleyne, and Miller found:
“More than mere reform, programs saw themselves shifting evaluation paradigms, which they considered cultural work with political consequences. Some came to recognize social identities as origins for their judgments. Central to implementing holistic review was navigating the politics of this cultural shift and the perceived legitimacy of specific criteria. Participants learned to discuss social science data and research to legitimize a new approach to selection. In doing so, admissions leaders found themselves managing and shifting discourse, shaping priorities, and dealing with skeptical colleagues. They spoke about cultivating the political savviness to manage colleagues’ concerns or outright resistance.”
Other findings from the pilot reiterate the importance of talking directly about race and racism if what you want to change has racial dimensions to it. The researchers concluded:
“…learning opportunities should equip leaders not only to change practices that produce racially disparate outcomes, but also to challenge racially biased language, assumptions, and judgments that show up in policy and process… To disrupt inequalities, professional development should empower participants to discuss racism, racialized organizational cultures present throughout US education, and the implications for their policies and practices.”
Those findings informed the development of the Consortium’s new track on mentoring and wellbeing and solidified its commitment to serving as a site for race-forward discussions of institutional change.
Scaling up and Scaling out
Like admissions, mentoring is an area of professional practice with consequences for equity, inclusion, wellbeing, and persistence, as recognized in two recent National Academies reports1 in which Posselt was an author. The Consortium’s curriculum is distinguished from others by thoughtfully structured discussion of issues related to racism and by moving the conversation about mentoring from dyadic relationships to organizational incentives and cultures. It is anchored in Kimberly Griffin’s model of equity-minded mentoring, published in a book co-edited by Adrianna Kezar and Julie Posselt. The curriculum was developed by Julie Posselt and Steve Desir, with support from scholars Annie Wofford, Sweeney Windchief, Ben Montpetit, Casey Miller, and members of the Center of the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). The three workshops in this track are:
- Introduction to Equity-Minded Mentoring
- Fostering Wellbeing in Racialized Mentoring Environments
- Building Organizational Cultures of Mentoring and Wellbeing
Mentoring, admissions, and recruitment operate synergistically in higher education, and one finding from the rollout of new curriculum is that participants in both tracks see benefit in having a facilitated process and ample time to move learning into action. Posselt comments, “Institutional change is defined by culture and politics and, for that kind of change, faculty and middle managers need time and multiple types of support. Changes that stick don’t occur overnight. They are most likely to take hold with the support of leaders up the chain of command and in a community of change agents who are moving together.”
Across the two tracks this year, the Consortium is proud to have offered 19 workshops led by 13 trained facilitators, reaching 826 participants. This summer, they will be offering facilitator trainings so members can continue offering these learning experiences on their campuses as part of systemic change initiatives. Consortium Manager Yasmin Kadir, “It was incredibly fulfilling to oversee the development of partnerships in the first national cohort of the Consortium. It’s reaffirming to see how a connected community helps to both strengthen the efforts of changemakers at their institutions and to catalyze the shared mission of equity in higher education.”
If you are interested in learning more about membership in the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, contact Consortium Manager Yasmin Kadir at equity@usc.edu. Information about these and other workshops is available at www.EquityGradEd.org
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1 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26803/AADEI_Highlights.pdf
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26015/ReportHighlights_Student_MentalHealth_FINAL.pdf