Julie Posselt’s book ‘Inside Graduate Admissions’ reviewed in Contexts

Julie Posselt’s book ‘Inside Graduate Admissions’ reviewed in Contexts

pulliasadmin College access, Equity & Diversity, Pullias Voices

Pullias faculty member Julie Posselt received yet another rave review for her book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Admissions, and Faculty Gatekeeping (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Just published in the Spring 2018 issue of Contexts, a quarterly magazine of cutting-edge social research, the review by Northwestern University’s Lauren A. Rivera calls Inside Graduate Admissions “an enthralling read”:

Inside Graduate Admissions is a riveting account of how faculty members select new PhD recruits and, ultimately, the next generation of scholars in their fields. Through careful ethnographic observation of ten admissions committees across nine top-ranked departments at three universities, as well as 86 interviews, Julie Posselt provides an inside look into how committees go about the challenging work of making admissions and rejection decisions.

Posselt, a scholar focusing on institutional inequalities in higher education, takes readers step-by-step through the selection process, unpacking the procedures and criteria used at every stage, including application review, interviews, and post-interview deliberations. Strikingly, she shows how processes of evaluation vary substantially depending on the stage of evaluation and across disciplines and evaluators. Faculty often have good intentions and a genuine desire to build each cohort from the “best” students with the highest potential for academic success regardless of their backgrounds. However, these plans often fall short, particularly when it comes to diversity. Decisions ostensibly based on merit and scholarly potential end up being about much more, including biased definitions of achievement, disciplinary conventions, intragroup dynamics, idiosyncratic preferences, and self-reproduction.

Read the complete review at SAGE. Posselt, an assistant professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education, is currently at work on a new book on academia to be published by Stanford University Press.