California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education

A partnership of five University of California campuses–Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara and San Diego–and University of Southern California, the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) is National Science Foundation-funded network of faculty and administrators across doctoral-granting universities that aims to improve how graduate programs in California admit and educate the scientists and engineers of the future.

The demographic composition of STEM graduate programs and the scientific workforce is not only different from the present composition of California and the US, but it is also lagging behind overall demographic trends. Addressing these inequities will help accelerate participation of all groups to create a robust workforce that reflects the talent and potential of our state and nation.

C-CIDE creates innovative systems for faculty-to-faculty professional development by which programs can 1) evaluate the efficacy and equity of inherited practices for recruiting, admitting, and mentoring graduate students, and 2) move toward improving and enhancing practices where needed. It is also a multi-institution network that will connect faculty committed to equity in doctoral education, in order to encourage the diffusion of inclusive practices. C-CIDE uses Networked Improvement Community framework developed by the Carnegie Foundation to achieve collective change at scale in educational settings.

Several STEM PhD programs and graduate school administrators from each of the six initial universities involved will receive professional development from project leaders in the form of workshops and continuous learning activities that provide background knowledge and practices for recruiting, admitting, and mentoring graduate students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. This project includes research involving a randomized controlled trial: one half of the programs will be receive workshops initially; the other half will receive their first workshops one year later. Faculty leaders emerging from each program will then be selected to nucleate campus-level teams who are trained and incentivized to deliver similar faculty-to-faculty learning opportunities on their campuses, in the spirit of the University of Michigan’s successful ADVANCE- STRIDE committee.

The project’s design will test the impact of faculty development on three outcomes: the admissions practices that PhD programs use, the diversity of their admitted cohorts, and the programs’ selectivity.