Collaborative Research: Scaling Faculty Development to Broaden Participation in Graduate Education

Despite a growing body of research about racial equity in graduate education, most faculty are not expected or given opportunities to engage with it. More and more faculty and graduate programs express commitments to racial equity and diversity, and want to contribute to cultural change, but few have knowledge, skill, or support to realize these goals. Systemic and cultural change are never simple, but they are feasible with evidence, relevant tools, change management strategies and supportive colleagues.
By piloting, studying, and refining a community-driven, multi-campus model that links institutional change and faculty development, C-CIDE (California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education) created a path to normalizing practices that more equitably select and serve talented students from the country’s emerging majority.

C-CIDE is scaling-up nationally (under the new name Equity in Graduate Education Consortium) and is being replicated in England as the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education (YCEDE).

The project formed a network that provided faculty and graduate school administrators within and across the University of Southern California and University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara with opportunity and incentives to critically reflect upon and change longstanding practices. Participating STEM PhD programs received professional development from project leaders in the form of workshops and continuous learning activities on recruiting, admitting, and mentoring graduate students from diverse backgrounds.

Read the abstract

Learn more with Equity in Graduate Education Resource Center

 Julie Posselt is Associate Professor of education and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Southern California, as well as current President of the Sociology of Education Association. Her research examines institutionalized inequities in higher education and organizational efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, especially in graduate education and the disciplines. Posselt is the author of more than 65 articles and three books, most recently Equity in Science (Stanford University Press). A five-time NSF PI, she currently directs the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium and the NSF-INCLUDES Inclusive Graduate Education Network Research Hub. She is a member of the Advisory Board for NSF’s Directorate for STEM Education, and she has been a member of three NASEM consensus studies. Posselt received the AERA Career Award as well as the ASHE Promising Scholar/ Early Career Award. She held a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation and earned her PhD from the University of Michigan. 

 Casey W. Miller is Sr. Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs in the College of Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  He is an experimental physicist focusing on nanoscale magnetic materials and related devices and diversity, equity, and inclusion in graduate education.  He currently serves as the director of the Inclusive Practices Hub of the NSF-INCLUDES Alliance: Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN) and co-PI of the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE), each of which has been supported by the NSF, and senior advisor to the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, did post-doctoral work at the University of California, San Diego, and is recipient of the NSF-CAREER and AFOSR-Young Investigator Awards.