Equity in Graduate Education About Us

We're building a learning community of scholars and practitioners advancing equity in graduate education through research-practice partnerships that generate, translate, and apply research into evidence-based, equitable practices.

Our approach

What do we mean by advancing equity?

From our perspective, racial equity occurs when graduate programs reconfigure the structures, cultures, and the system in which they are embedded, to ensure historically marginalized communities have the opportunity to participate and thrive. This work is critically needed: histories of racialized exclusion from the academy mean that participation in doctoral education by Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color as well as and women and non-binary people of all backgrounds, has never matched their representation in the population. Disparate exclusion from graduate education limits individual opportunities, the health and evolution of the disciplines, and possibilities of reducing inequalities in society and the labor market. These are matters of power and justice, and we embrace them as such.

Translating research & theory to practice... and back again

Research-Practice Partnerships promote an iterative cycle of producing, translating, and applying research. We aim to advance original social science theory & research, and to use the findings to inform the development and institutionalization of practices that positively affect access, success, and student wellbeing.

To that end, our dissemination strategy involves publishing research in leading outlets, as well as translating research into accessible formats such as research digests, workshops, webinars and our quarterly Virtual Journal Club. By engaging in rich discussion with those who are actively learning to enhance their practice and grow as change agents, new questions for research emerge.

Projects & Partners

The NSF INCLUDES Alliance: IGEN (Inclusive Graduate Education Network, or IGEN) is a partnership of over 30 societies, institutions, organizations, corporations, and national laboratories poised to lead a paradigm shift in increasing the participation of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (UREM) students who enter graduate or doctorate level programs in the physical sciences. Its charge is to match the advanced degree participation rates to those of undergraduate student percentages and eliminate this disparity while increasing diversity in the reserve of future scientists. The project's goals are to:

  • Increase the fraction of students from underrepresented groups who complete doctoral degrees in the physical sciences.

  • Catalyze the adoption of evidence-based inclusive practices. that reduce inequities in doctoral enrollment and completion for underrepresented groups and benefit all students.

  • Conduct research and propagate results that distill scalable, effective practices in inclusive graduate education and institutional change within the physical sciences.

  • Establish sustained, cross-sector partnerships that support the advancement of underrepresented students from undergraduate through professional employment.

The California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) is a pilot partnership of six California research universities (UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UC-San Diego, UC-Santa Barbara, and USC) and at least four PhD programs within each institution that nucleates a scalable, sustainable networked improvement committee focused on building capacity for faculty practices that may reduce inequities in STEM graduate education. Funded by the NSF Innovations in Graduate Education program, it is developing and refining a multicampus, multidisciplinary model of faculty development, aimed at creating a path to institutionalizing practices that more equitably select and serve students from the country's emerging majority. The project's goals are:

  • Scale up existing graduate admissions and recruitment workshops to new contexts.

  • Evaluate the efficacy of the scaled workshops in effecting faculty practices and the diversity and selectivity of participating programs.

  • Develop within and across leading California research universities a networked improvement community (NIC) focused on increasing diversity and inclusion in graduate education.

  • Understand the barriers to and enablers of faculty development in graduate education, as mediated by the NIC.

People

Julie R. Posselt

IGEN Research Hub Director & PI of C-CIDE

Casey W. Miller

IGEN Inclusive Practices Director & Co-PI of C-CIDE

Steve Desir

IGEN Research Hub Coordinator; C-CIDE Director of Learning & Development

Stephanie Santos

IGEN Inclusive Practices Hub Coordinator

Yasmin Kadir

C-CIDE Manager

FAQs about the NSF INCLUDES IGEN Alliance

FAQ About Doctoral Education.pdf
IGEN FAQ Aug2019 (1).pdf

Funding

Our work is supported by the National Science Foundation through INCLUDES and Innovations in Graduate Education Grants Nos. 1834540, 1834545, 1834528 and 1834516, 1806705, and 1807047. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

We are proud to partner with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in providing ongoing faculty professional development to leaders of the University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. The Sloan Foundation has also provided a planning grant to scale up C-CIDE to the national level.

Through research-practice partnerships with universities, disciplinary societies, and their members, our resources build capacity to equitably select and educate the next generation of American scholars.