The College Fix

You’ll only get candid discussion of what really goes on in Ph.D. admissions committees if you give their faculty total anonymity.

That’s what Julie Posselt, assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, did in order to shine a light on “one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Posselt’s new book Inside Graduate Admissions provides a troubling look at how decisions are made behind the closed doors of these committees, from her firsthand review of “6 highly ranked departments” at three research schools and interviews with faculty at four others.

One finding: Though white males “dominated” the committees, racial and ethnic minorities got a “slight tip among otherwise equal candidates” in the final round.

But there are so few qualified minorities (who aren’t international Asian students) that committees fear they’ll lose these accepted applicants to the best-ranked schools, like Princeton, Caltech or Columbia, lowering their “yield.”

Though programs heavily rely on GRE scores – because of grade inflation, GPA is now useless – committees are giving one group particular scrutiny:

The departments observed by Posselt appear to practice a form of affirmative action for everyone who is not an international Asian student in that professors de-emphasize the (typically extremely high) GRE scores of such applicants to avoid admitting what they would consider to be too many of them. …

Referring to international applicants, one scientist told Posselt, “The scores on the standardized tests are just out of sight, just off the charts. So you can basically throw that out as a discriminator. They’re all doing 90th percentile and above. The domestic students are all over the place so there was actually some spread, some dispersion … so you could use that more as one of the quantifiers.”

They also think the Chinese applicants are rampant cheaters on English proficiency tests.

And if you went to a conservative religious college, be prepared for rejection unless your GRE score is off the charts:

The applicant, to a linguistics Ph.D. program, was a student at a small religious college unknown to some committee members but whose values were questioned by others.

“Right-wing religious fundamentalists,” one committee member said of the college, while another said, to much laughter, that the college was “supported by the Koch brothers.” …

The chair of the committee said, “I would like to beat that college out of her,” and, to laughter from committee members asked, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?”

Read the story.

h/t Dr. Carol Swain

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: Shutterstock