An intentional and campus wide approach and a holistic evaluation of underrepresented students in the admissions process can help graduate schools cultivate a diverse and inclusive student body and produce degree-holders who are culturally competent.

That was a key takeaway from a panel discussion Friday at the 58th annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools. Hosted by Education Testing Service and moderated by Diverse Executive Editor Dr. Jamal Eric Watson, “Diversity in Graduate Education: Looking At, and Beyond, Admissions” explored how graduate schools can increase diversity and inclusion by effectively recruiting and retaining students from underrepresented groups. It followed a webinar on the topic last month and provided some additional insights.

Contacts:

Katherine Hazelrigg, Council of Graduate Schools

(202) 461-3888 | khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Beth Dempsey, ProQuest

(248) 349-7810 | beth.dempsey@proquest.com

Washington, DC – The Council of Graduate Schools / ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards, the nation’s most prestigious honors for doctoral dissertations, were presented to Mohamed S. Ibrahim and Eiko Strader during the Council’s award ceremony during the 58th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Dr. Ibrahim completed his PhD in 2018 at Duke University in electrical and computer engineering, and Dr. Strader received her PhD in 2017 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in sociology.

Bestowed annually since 1982, the awards recognize recent doctoral recipients who have made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields. ProQuest, an international leader in dissertation archiving, discovery, and access, sponsors the awards and an independent committee from the Council of Graduate Schools selects the winners. Two awards are given each year, rotating among four general areas of scholarship. The winners receive a certificate, a $2,000 honorarium, and funds for travel to the awards ceremony.

“The Distinguished Dissertation Awards recognize the significant contributions young scholars make in their disciplines,” said CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega. “Dr. Ibrahim and Dr. Strader’s work demonstrates the value and impact of graduate education to the world.”

“These are exceptional scholars who have contributed important insights to their fields,” said Allan Lu, ProQuest Vice President, Research Tools, Services & Platforms. “We’re proud to recognize their work and are confident these dissertations significantly move forward their fields of study.”

The 2018 Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering was presented to Dr. Ibrahim for his dissertation, Optimization of Trustworthy Biomolecular Quantitative Analysis Using Cyber-Physical Microfluidic Platforms. Ibrahim’s work involves microfluidic biochips, or lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology. These devices integrate one or more laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit, commonly called a chip, and operate using quantitative analysis protocols, including things like blood glucose testing, DNA forensics, pathogen detection, and cancer research. Ibrahim’s dissertation addresses the challenges associated with design optimization and security threats that exist in the development of microfluidic technology and bridges the fields of molecular biology, computing, and electrical engineering. Through his research, Ibrahim hopes to, “streamline design methodologies related to the miniaturization of quantitative-analysis protocols.” Dr. Ibrahim is currently a research and development engineer at the Intel Corporation.

Dr. Strader received the 2018 Award in Social Sciences for her dissertation, Immigration and Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, and Care Outsourcing Exacerbate and Erode Earnings Inequalities. In response to the policy rhetoric regarding the economic threat of increased immigration to low-educated, native-born men in the labor market, Strader analyzes 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007 to better understand the regional differences in the way immigration affects wages. She concludes that, “the wage effects of immigration are the result of gendered, raced and classed queuing processes, as well as changes in household production decisions.” Dr. Strader is currently as assistant professor of public policy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The George Washington University.

More information about the CGS / ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award is available at www.proquest.com/go/scholars or at www.cgsnet.org.

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Contact: Katherine Hazelrigg

(202) 461-3888 / khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Washington, DC – The Board of Directors of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has announced that Dr. Steven W. Matson, dean of The Graduate School and professor of biology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the 2018 recipient of the Debra W. Stewart Award for Outstanding Leadership in Graduate Education. Matson received the honor at an awards ceremony held during the CGS 58th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

For his invaluable contributions to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate community, Dr. Matson becomes the third Debra W. Stewart Award recipient. A passionate advocate for graduate education, Dr. Matson developed a number of professional development programs aimed at preparing the next generation of academics as well as the next generation of business, non-profit, and civic leaders. Under Matson’s tenure, UNC launched several Professional Science Master’s degrees, designed to meet the needs of today’s professionals who want to expand their technical and business knowledge and apply it to emerging professional fields within science and health.

During his years as dean, the Diversity and Student Success program was established within The Graduate School, providing programming to support first-generation, international, underrepresented minority, military-affiliated and LGBTQIA graduate students.

Matson has been involved in many CGS projects, including PhD Career Pathways, Professional Development for Graduate Students in STEM Fields, and the Future of the PhD Dissertation. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Council of Graduate Schools, the Board of Directors of the Graduate Record Exam (Chair, 2016-17), and on the Board of Directors for the TOEFL Exam. He also served as President (2016-17) of the North Carolina Council of Graduate Schools.

“Steve Matson works for our graduate students in every possible way. From encouraging their research and teaching at Carolina to preparing them for the rapidly changing global job market, he has tirelessly served as Dean of The Graduate School since 2008,” said UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol L. Folt. “Dr. Matson has led the creation of powerful initiatives that encouraged community, diversity and academic accomplishment, expanding interdisciplinary funding and professional development. Our graduate students have benefited greatly from his leadership, and our university is indebted to him for his outstanding service.”

“Providing programming and resources to support first-generation, international, underrepresented minority, military-affiliated and LGBTQIA graduate students by establishing the Diversity and Student Success program within The Graduate School at UNC demonstrates Steve’s dedication and commitment to establishing an inclusive graduate school community,” said Dr. Karen Butler-Purry, associate provost for graduate and professional studies at Texas A&M University and chair of the Council’s Board of Directors. “Steve has always been generous with his time and willing to share his invaluable experience and advice mentoring new graduate deans.”

The award was created in 2016 by the CGS Board of Directors to recognize outstanding leadership in graduate education, and particularly those leadership qualities exemplified by the Council’s fifth President, Debra W. Stewart. The selection committee considers nominees with a strong reputation for ethics and integrity, a history of active participation in the graduate community, and a record of strategic vision and actions resulting in meaningful impacts. Areas of special consideration include evidence-based innovation, program development, diversity and inclusion, student learning and career outcomes, personnel management, policy advocacy in support of graduate education and research, and fiscal responsibility.

Nominees for the award must be a current senior, graduate dean at a CGS member institution (Regular or Associate) and cannot be an active member of the CGS Board of Directors. Nominations are made by CGS member institutions and are reviewed by a selection committee of former graduate deans in the CGS community. The winner receives a $4,000 prize to support continuing innovations at the awardee’s institution.

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Contacts:

Katherine Hazelrigg, CGS

(202) 461-3888 | khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Jason Baran, ETS

(609) 683-2428 | jbaran@ets.org

Washington, DC – Today the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and ETS presented Vanderbilt University with the 2018 ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education: From Admission through Completion. Dr. Mark Wallace, dean of the Graduate School and Louise B. McGavock Endowed Chair, accepted the co-sponsored award on Vanderbilt’s behalf during the award ceremony at CGS’s 58^th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

The ETS/CGS Award for Innovation in Promoting Success in Graduate Education recognizes promising, innovative proposals to enhance student success and degree completion at the master’s and doctoral levels while promoting inclusiveness. The winning institution is selected on the strength of its proposal to meet the award’s goals and to serve as a model for other schools. The winner receives a two-year, $20,000 matching grant.

The proposal for Vanderbilt University’s Russell G. Hamilton Leadership Development Institute, Supporting the Transformation from Students to Leaders promotes graduate student leadership development through three innovative interventions. “FirstGen Success” will provide graduate students who self-identify as first-generation students with three avenues of support: discussion groups and social events, formal training events, and experiential learning of professional norms. “Training Tomorrow’s Mentors” aims to improve the quality of mentoring by providing training to mentees that will prepare them to be the mentors of tomorrow. Lastly, through “Managing Conflict and Difficult Conversations,” external mediation skills trainers will conduct workshops to teach students, postdocs, faculty, and staff how to confront and successfully navigate conflict.

“We are honored and delighted to be the recipient of this generous award from ETS and CGS. Establishing the Russell G. Hamilton Leadership Institute is among several bold strategic investments that Vanderbilt University is making in Ph.D. education, so we are deeply honored with this recognition” said Mark Wallace, dean of the Graduate School and Louise B. McGavock Endowed Chair, Vanderbilt University. “The support provided through this award will allow us to build innovative new programming to provide the tools for our graduate students to become society’s future leaders--through robust career development support, a collaborative culture that encourages interdisciplinary discovery, and much more.”

“We are grateful to ETS, whose support makes possible this innovative way to promote best practices among graduate schools. Vanderbilt’s Russell G. Hamilton Leadership Development Institute is a model that addresses the needs of all graduate students, with particular attention to first-generation students, underrepresented minorities, and women in the academy and is one that could be replicated on other campuses,” said CGS President Suzanne T. Ortega.

“Vanderbilt deserves this honor in recognition of the school’s approach to advancing graduate education by holistically supporting the graduate student lifecycle,” said David G. Payne, vice president and COO of ETS’s Global Education Division. “Their system not only includes an integrated set of supports that help students to be successful on their academic and career journeys, but it also successfully promotes diversity and inclusivity.”

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Contact: Katherine Hazelrigg

(202) 461-3888 / khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu

Washington, DC – The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has awarded the 2018 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities to Dr. Carrie Hyde, associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. The awards ceremony was held during the CGS 58th Annual Meeting.

The Arlt Award is given annually to a young scholar-teacher who has written a book deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities. Dr. Hyde becomes the award’s 48^th recipient for her book, Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of US Citizenship (Harvard UP, 2018). She received her PhD in English from the Rutgers University, New Brunswick in 2011.

In Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of US Citizenship, Hyde examines the evolution of the way citizenship was conceptualized in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. No Constitutional definition of citizenship existed until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, which led politicians and writers to seek a construct of citizenship in fiction, religion, political philosophy, law, and literature imparted with moral and/or ethical guidance. Through Civic Longing, Hyde provides, “a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.”

“The Council of Graduate Schools is delighted to present this year’s Arlt award to Dr. Hyde for the outstanding scholarship in her recent book Civic Longing. The Arlt award recognizes exceptional work by early-career humanities faculty, and Dr. Hyde’s work is an invaluable contribution to understanding the history of U.S. citizenship and its complexities,” said Dr. Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools.

Created in 1971, the Arlt Award honors the first president of CGS, Gustave O. Arlt. The winner must have earned a doctorate within the past seven years, and currently be teaching at a North American university. Nominations are made by CGS member institutions and are reviewed by a panel of scholars in the field of competition, which rotates annually among seven disciplines within the humanities. This year’s field was English and North American Language and Literature. The winner receives a $1,000 honorarium, a certificate, and travel to the awards ceremony.

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CGS Contact: Katherine Hazelrigg                                                                  ETS Contact: Jason Baran

(202) 461-3888 / khazelrigg@cgs.nche.edu                                                (609) 683-2428 / jbaran@ets.org

In Master’s Degree Programs, Admissions Processes Prioritize Retention

CGS Study Highlights Goals and Limitations of Current Master’s Admissions Processes

Washington, DC — Today the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) released findings from a year-long study designed to better understand the processes and criteria used to evaluate applicants to master’s degree programs. Supported in part by Educational Testing Service (ETS), the project sheds new light on the way master’s programs select their future students.

Among the project’s key findings is that both master’s program faculty and graduate deans consider the ability to successfully complete coursework to be an important criterion for evaluating candidates for admission. In a survey conducted by CGS, 79% of research-focused master’s program directors and 84% of professionally-focused master’s program directors identified the potential to complete coursework as a very important consideration during the admissions process. This finding suggests that universities place higher value on the likelihood of a student’s retention relative to their potential to contribute to the program environment and other factors.

The findings also shed light on the various weight given to common elements in a student’s application package. According to the survey, letters of recommendation are used to evaluate a wide range of cognitive and non-cognitive attributes. For example, letters of recommendation were used by 90 to 92% of the graduate program directors as evidence of an applicant’s non-cognitive qualities, such as persistence, dependability, and collegiality/collaboration/cooperation. Because letters of recommendation can introduce biases into the admissions process, however, this finding suggests that it is very important for programs to develop consistent ways of evaluating a letter’s contribution to the admissions package.

“There is quite a bit of agreement about the evaluation criteria and processes used in master’s admissions, and the apparent focus given to student retention is good news,” said CGS President Suzanne Ortega. “However, this study also uncovered opportunities to help master’s admissions committees and deans achieve their admissions goals more effectively. We need better resources, such as rubrics, to help universities consider candidates consistently and with attention to the full range of attributes they are seeking for their programs.”

David Payne, ETS vice president of global education, said, “The programs and deans surveyed consistently identified critical thinking as a key attribute they consider when evaluating an applicant’s potential to achieve desired outcomes, such as degree completion and post-graduate success. The GRE® General Test measures aspects of critical thinking in each of the test’s three sections, and it continues to provide value as a common, objective measure to compare applicants with various backgrounds and educational experiences. The report recommends that those involved in the admissions process receive more training around evaluating submitted materials, including score interpretation and avoiding bias. This may include how reviewers should weight GRE scores — as part of a holistic admissions process that places appropriate value on all submitted materials — to achieve their program’s enrollment goals.”

The study’s authors outline five recommendations aimed at master’s education leaders interested in improving the master’s admissions process. The recommendations include providing greater transparency in master’s admissions procedures, providing information and support to help admissions committees avoid biases, offering training to increase faculty and staff involvement in the process, and developing tools to evaluate non-cognitive attributes. The report also calls for additional research to clarify best practices in this area.

More information about the report, including data tables from the surveys, can be found on the CGS website.

About the report

Master’s Admissions: Transparency, Guidance, and Training is the final report of the CGS/ETS Master’s Admissions Attributes project, which was conducted in three stages: regional focus groups to develop survey tools; two surveys, one for graduate school staff and for master’s program directors; and a colloquium to discuss the results from the two surveys and their implications. Three research questions were developed to guide the conversation: 1) What is success in a master’s program? 2) What attributes are currently used in admissions decisions to predict success? 3) What evidence is currently used to evaluate the attributes? The report outlines and summarizes the project findings.

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A doctorate degree is the highest traditional academic degree. Earning a Doctor of Philosophy, or Ph.D. for short, can be a long endeavor, taking anywhere from three to 10 years of study. Doctoral candidates also are expected to conduct research and publish as part of their degree programs.

Doctoral degrees are among the most difficult to earn, with around a third of students dropping out of Ph.D. programs in the 10th year, per a 2008 study from the Council of Graduate Schools.

The drop is something that hasn't been seen since 2004: the first year that the Council of Graduate Schools first began collecting data on international application and first-time enrollment rates in United States graduate programs. According to the American Institute of Physics, which compiled all available data from the International Graduate Admissions Survey administered by the Council of Graduate schools, international applications and first-time enrollment rates rose every year from 2006 through 2016, inclusive, with a tiny decline (~1%) from 2016 to 2017.

International student enrollments for US graduate schools are down for the second year in a row according to a new report, raising concerns as to what’s behind the continuing decline.

The number of first-time international graduate students enrolled in U.S. programs fell 3.7% from the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017, with their share among first-time grad students falling from 22% to 20.3% during that period, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools. There were proportionally more first-time international graduate students at private nonprofits (24.2%) than public colleges (19%) in the fall of 2017.