Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping by Julie R. Posselt (review)

Every year, thousands of prospective students submit applications to be reviewed by faculty admissions committees with the hope of being admitted to highly competitive graduate programs. The decision processes graduate admissions committees use to evaluate applicants are often opaque – not just to applicants, but also to policymakers, researchers, and the public. Inside Graduate Admissions provides readers an up-close view into the behind-the-scenes deliberations of faculty admissions committees. In so doing, it surfaces subtle heuristics and social processes that influence the ultimate determination to accept or reject applicants. The descriptions in the book illustrate potential inequities that may result from overreliance on certain criteria as proxies of applicant quality.

In the book, Posselt addresses two main questions: "How do faculty members individually judge and collectively select prospective doctoral students?" and "How do disciplines shape judgments of admissibility?" (p. 179). To explore these questions, Posselt conducted ethnographic case studies of ten different departments (representing three disciplines: natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences) within three research universities designated with the Very High (RU/VH) research activity Carnegie classification. She conducted individual interviews with faculty members and made observations of application review meetings.

The book is organized into six chapters, with each chapter addressing a slightly different question. The book's main research questions are discussed in Chapters 1–3 ("Decision Making as Deliberative Bureaucracy," "Meanings of Merit and Diversity," and "Disciplinary Logics"), where the author explains the mechanics of the decision making process, what faculty members regard as merit, and the logistics of different disciplines' judgments of admissibility. Chapters 4–6 ("Mirror, Mirror," "The Search for Intelligence Life," and "International Students and Ambiguities of Holistic Review") then explore more deeply facets of the ideas that are discussed in the first three chapters. For instance, in "Mirror, Mirror," Posselt elaborates on the criteria that faculty committees use to select the most meritorious applicants. She argues that faculty members see merit in applicants whose qualifications reflect their own characteristics – applicants who are similar to them. In "Search for Intelligence," Posselt expands on faculty members' definitions of merit with an extensive focus on inferences about applicants' intelligence. Finally, in "International Students and Ambiguities of Holistic Review," the aforesaid research questions about faculty members' decision-making and inferences about applicants' merit are discussed with regard to international applicants. We provide a summary of each chapter below.

In Chapter 1, Posselt examines "why faculty in highly ranked doctoral programs rely on admissions criteria that may undermine stated aims for equity and diversity" (p. 22). Posselt's observations and interviews reveal that the main criteria faculty committees used to trim down large pools of applicants were GRE scores, grades, and university pedigree. Interviews with faculty and observations of the application review meetings revealed that these criteria were used for their speed and convenience, not because they were the best indicators of students' success in the program. Faculty committees over rely on these criteria to reduce disagreements and promote collegial decision-making. This is what Posselt refers to as "deliberative bureaucracy" (p. 20), which may result in perpetuating patterns of privilege and inequity.

In Chapter 2, Posselt addresses how faculty members define merit in applicants and what attempts, if any, they make to incorporate diversity in their decisions. The findings indicate that the main criteria that faculty used to draw inferences about applicants' merit were GRE scores and grade point average. Posselt questions this over-simplified inference by accentuating the contradiction between what faculty think GRE scores signal and what the scores actually signal. She highlights faculty members' colorful opinions about the ability of GRE scores to predict student achievement. With regard to diversity, Posselt observes that many faculty members felt obliged to incorporate diversity into their academic disciplines; however, given their desire to uphold conventions and avoid controversy, many of them exhibited behaviors that suggested racial equity was of secondary importance.

In Chapter...