Julie Posselt and Darnell Cole in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Lawyers on Race-Conscious Admissions

Two Pullias Center faculty members were featured in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. Julie Posselt, an assistant professor of higher education at the USC Rossier School of Education, and Darnell Cole, an associate professor of education at USC Rossier, both spoke at the University of Southern California’s Admissions, Race and Identity conference.

In “Does Whiteness Equal Meritocracy in Admissions?,” Julie Posselt, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, explained that institutions were created for white men and will resist change. That’s borne out in research on stereotypes, implicit bias, and standardized testing.

“Systems of selection in education end up reproducing unequal outcomes,” she said.

It’s up to admissions professionals to try to work against those forces, Posselt said. To do that, they should change what they’re asking of applicants, how they judge what applicants give them, and who is doing the judging.

Darnell Cole, an associate professor of education at Southern California, brought up the strange way that college admissions encourages applicants to emphasize the challenges in their lives in order to gain entry into the top colleges.

“What is lost when disadvantaged students are forced to commodify their backgrounds for the sake of college admissions?” he said.

Read the full article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Posselt is a national expert on graduate admissions and holistic admissions policies; Cole is a co-director of the Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice at USC.