Building a More Equitable Graduate Program through Holistic Admissions

As the UC Student body grows to reflect the diversity of California’s population, graduate and faculty populations have conspicuously failed to keep pace. One of the key impediments to recruiting a  professoriate resides farther back in the pipeline, in the traditional processes and criteria for graduate admissions. These, we are happy to report, have begun to change in tangible ways at the UC Davis English department. 

In 2018, Professor Desirée Martín joined the Alliance for Multi-Campus Inclusive Graduate Admissions (AMIGA), a Mellon-Foundation-funded initiative to try and remove this barrier to equity in post-graduate education. Now we are two cycles into employing a revamped English PhD admissions process that better reflects the department’s commitments to equity and racial justice. Unless you’ve been on either end of department admissions recently, you’re probably unaware of what has changed. So here is a brief overview of the department’s newly “holistic” admissions process.

AMIGA emerged in 2016 out of the need to transform admissions in order to increase graduate student diversity. It started with a collaboration between Josephine Moreno from UC Davis Graduate Studies, Julie Posselt from USC and David Schaberg from UCLA. Two years later it received Mellon funding to provide humanities and social science departments at UCD and UCLA with guidance and resources for a more equitable “holistic admissions” process. English was among the first departments at Davis to implement AMIGA’s recommendations along with Linguistics, Spanish/Portuguese, and Philosophy. AMIGA now contributes campus-wide and department-specific training to help individual departments draft field-specific rubrics for admitting candidates. 

So what changed in our own department’s PhD admissions criteria? Rather than privileging traditional markers like scores and grades, AMIGA encourages committees to consider aspects of a candidate’s experience that may initially appear to be extra-academic but which are ultimately central to a graduate student’s success. These include assessments of the distance a candidate has traveled to be in the position to apply to graduate school as well as their ability to overcome hurdles along the way. Though valuing such accomplishments may sound both simple and obvious, admissions have not always taken a student’s life path into account. Fortunately, AMIGA’s guidance found willing adopters among English faculty. 

Two years ago, the department overhauled its relationship to the most habitual elements of a PhD program application. It removed the GRE requirement, which many scholars of equity in higher education believe has had an outsized role on admissions decisions. Transcripts and letters of recommendation remain required, but are interpreted through a new lens, a set of rubrics that ensure no one marker can exert too much influence. The overarching objective with holistic admissions has been to standardize how faculty approach individual applications and make the process subject to a shared set of evaluative priorities that the committee as a whole shares. For admissions committees this means attempting to bracket the biases we all inevitably bring to bear on our experience of the world. 

When asked about her experience as one of AMIGA’s participating faculty members, Martín reports that “the results have been really positive because people can see that this is a better process—it’s more ethical and it’s easier. What’s to lose?” Indeed, there is little to lose and much to gain from this simple yet transformative change in admissions. When asked why AMIGA and our own department’s holistic admissions got going now, Martín spoke from her own personal experience:

“As hard as it’s been to break into the ranks of faculty for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, there are a few more of us now. Underrepresented faculty have been looking around and been able to articulate their own alienation within a department and the ways they may have been tokenized and marginalized. Even when departments don't intend it, often it happens. If you're looking around at a constellation of faculty or students with relatively similar backgrounds, you can start to ask, ‘well, where do I fit into this?’ Part of this has been a process of paying it forward and trying to open up the playing field for students who might not have the chance or ability to see themselves reflected in the faculty and in the grad population, and to see that they too have a place and that their voice is needed—that their voice makes the institution better.”

Though AMIGA’s recommendations have been readily adopted, there is much work to be done, particularly with retention, which falls outside the scope of AMIGA’s funding mandate. That’s Martín’s current hobby horse and one she shares with outgoing department chair John Marx. Marx echoed his desire to keep the department moving in this direction by supporting the increasingly diverse cohort of graduate students it admits each year—“We’re having different conversations about curriculum and mentoring now because of the pressure grad students are bringing to bear. That pressure is welcome and confirms the sense faculty have that such conversations are necessary.” And diversifying our graduate student body matters because, as Martín so eloquently put it, “a homogenous group won’t learn from itself.”