In Ph.D. Funding, Identity Shouldn’t Trump Merit

In a February 2022 memorandum, senior graduate school officials at the University of Southern California announced a series of steps they were taking “to make clear our commitment to diversity as integral to scholarly excellence, and to enhance our ability to recruit students who contribute to this diversity.” Among these steps, the memo announced the elimination of the Diversity, Inclusion, Access label previously applied to a category of doctoral fellowship “top-off” awards offered exclusively to prospective doctoral students from underrepresented groups. These top-off awards are made centrally to supplement department offers of teaching and research assistantships to prospective doctoral students.

This change, the memo says, is, “in response to research that suggests that scholarships and fellowships designated specifically for minoritized students may unwittingly contribute to such students’ marginalization once they enroll.”

At first blush, it may appear that USC was acting to diminish the role of group identity in making awards to prospective students, but the opposite is true. Rather, the administration announced plans to “fold the previously-named DIA top offs into the existing Provost’s fellowship top offs” and “modify the requirements of the Provost’s fellowship top offs to include a student’s contribution to diversity and/or the reduction of salient inequalities in a program or field.”

“Provost fellowship top offs should not be used for recruiting generically ‘good’ students,” the memo states, “but for students who stand out through their academic or professional contributions and by contributing to diversity and/or the reduction of salient inequalities in the program and/or field.”

Taken literally, it does not matter how intellectually or academically or professionally or artistically strong a USC department or school considers a doctoral applicant. He or she is only eligible for the highest level of funding support that USC offers if the student is a member of an underrepresented group. If the strongest students to apply are white, they are likely out of the running. In technical fields, East or South Asians are likely out of the running, unless they are women, and perhaps even then.

These hypothetical excellent students might still receive offers of admission and support, but not with stipends and terms configured to maximize the likelihood that they will accept these offers. It does not matter what they have accomplished, or published, or how prominent their internal or external faculty advocates are. They are not eligible to compete for the best support that USC has to offer, because they are not the students the administration wants most.

The graduate school leaders’ memo defines “contributions to diversity” in terms of both social identity and economic class, saying they may include “a. social identities and other backgrounds that are underrepresented in the field of study nationally or in [a] USC program” or “b. first generation U.S. citizens, first generation in their families to graduate from a four-year college, or experiences with financial and economic hardship in an applicant’s family.” But none of these criteria account for the intellectual or academic qualifications of an applicant or their performance to date. None focus on the quality of the work the applicant might do or might assist the faculty to do.

Our review of more than 30 graduate school websites for leading U.S. research universities suggests that while most leading institutions dedicate some share of resources to funding mostly or exclusively students from underrepresented groups, USC’s reliance on group identity to define eligibility for centralized doctoral support is particularly extreme. Further, USC’s leadership is unusually explicit that the institution is prepared to trade off identity against merit with respect to support decisions.

This trade-off is happening in the context of an institutionwide emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. USC’s President’s and Provost’s Task Force on Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion asserts that USC faculty, staff, and students “are all inculcated in the habits of a society that has deeply embedded practices of white supremacy” and calls for many interventions to better support DEI objectives within the organization. This claim of white supremacy ignores important empirical truths. For example, USC reports white Americans comprise only 25 percent of its student body and are thus significantly underrepresented relative to their share of the U.S. population. Further, white Europeans do not have the highest median income in the United States. The most pressing group-specific challenge in higher education affects men. Still, USC’s leaders want to demonstrate their strong commitment to DEI objectives. Unfortunately, their steps include awarding centrally controlled resources to prospective Ph.D. students on the basis of group membership, thus intruding on the faculty’s selection of advanced graduate students.

It remains critically important to the advancement of both scientific fields and research institutions to attract the best performers. Contemporary technical research tends to be team-based. Innovation in scientific teams is often the result of teammates mutually prompting one another’s thoughts, comparing ideas and resolving differences in understandings and assumptions. There is evidence that mixed-gender teams with equivalent IQ levels outperform same-gendered teams in medical research. There is also evidence that more racially diverse teams will on average outperform less diverse teams, particularly in social science research, but these results are predicated on a ceteris paribus assumption that all else is equal. A pervasive explanation is that diverse teams tend to be a less comfortable experience for the members than are more homogeneous teams, and that overcoming this discomfort is a further source of creativity and problem solving.

No one knows exactly what the diversity premium is with respect to team performance, but there is no reason to think that more diverse teams consisting of less qualified personnel are likely to outperform less diverse teams of otherwise more qualified personnel. Unfortunately, this is exactly the trade-off USC and other institutions are positioning their processes and rules to embrace.

By contrast, the leaders of California’s public institutions face constraints in considering race, ethnicity or gender as a result of Proposition 209, which prohibits the state from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin with respect to public employment, public education and public contracting. A legislative effort in 2020 placed a proposition before the electorate to try to repeal Proposition 209, but this was rejected by the voters. Even in today’s progressive California, there is statewide skepticism about the merits of allocating opportunity even partially on the basis of group identity.

California’s private universities—including USC—are not constrained by Proposition 209 and can still engage in affirmative action in student admissions and support, doctoral or otherwise, and do. Matters may change later this year as a result of two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, et al., and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

We hope matters do change. It is strange and disappointing that the University of Southern California leadership’s interest in doctoral students affords such primacy to group membership. Injecting identity politics into an otherwise meritocratic selection process is ultimately destructive. Ability is of paramount importance in a research environment. The fundamental objective of research universities should be producing the highest-quality, most impactful research findings that the organization can deliver. Success requires a focus on the work that has been and thus might yet be done, not on who does it. To focus elsewhere is to erode the fundamental mission of the institution by constraining the machinery of success.