Abstract
Students of color (SOC) face multiple barriers to being admitted and retained in social work doctoral programs. We describe these hurdles and propose approaches to circumvent them. Admission challenges include a lack of guidance, financial hurdles, underpreparedness, and racism directed at applicants. Retention challenges include a dearth of mentorship, financial hardship, lack of academic support, and discrimination experienced by students. We propose institutional and structural responses to these challenges. Programs should recruit from milieus marked by diversity, de-emphasize standardized scores and blind reviews in admissions, increase faculty of color numbers, establish crosscutting mentorship networks, and expand academic and financial support. At the structural level, teaching credentials for core classes should be reconsidered, research and publication reimagined, and community engagement emphasized. Finally, moves like the replacement of tenured with adjunct faculty and the initiation of doctorate in social work programs should be examined for their implications to the career prospects of SOC.
Racial and ethnic diversity remains a significant concern within academia, with minority students continuing to be underrepresented in doctoral programs (Griffin & Muniz, 2011; Vargas & Conlon, 2011). Despite decreasing in the proportion that they make up of the general population in the United States, White men are overwhelmingly in the majority in the social work academy (Aguirre, 2000; Medina & Luna, 2000; Sakamoto, Anastas, McPhail, & Colarossi, 2008). Students of color (SOC) continue to face significant challenges to enrolling in graduate programs (Breneman, 1998; Chen, Szalacha, & Menon, 2014; Gutiérrez, Yeakley, & Ortega, 2000; McDonough & Fann, 2007; Perna & Titus, 2005) and in successfully completing their degrees (Gutierrez & Poore, 1990; Nadal, Wong, Griffin, Davidoff, & Sriken, 2014; Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000). Scholars have called for the need to address these disparities in order to work toward an integration of marginalized communities and the diverse perspectives they bring to the academy (Barsky, Green, & Ayayo, 2014; House, Fowler, Thorton, & Francis, 2007; Hughes, Horner, & Ortiz, 2012; Roberts & Smith, 2002).
This article explores some of the significant barriers confronting SOC seeking a doctoral degree and discusses some strategies to address them by engaging with some of the latest trends in doctoral education in social work in the United States. We intend this to be a thought piece that triggers conversations around an issue that is critical to the future of the discipline.
Scholars have found that the challenges confronting SOC seeking to complete their doctorates generally fall into two categories: barriers to admissions and challenges related to retention.
Barriers to Admission
Scholars have found that in their academic careers leading up to graduate school, SOC have to get past obstacles put up by authority figures such as counselors, teachers, and administrators (Espino, 2014; Gutiérrez et al., 2000). In some cases, this is exacerbated by a lack of encouragement from family members who are dependent on them to provide financial support (Diefenbeck, Michalec, & Alexander, 2016) or are resistant to the idea of women seeking more education (Leyva, 2011). SOC often identify financial barriers as a major impediment to entering graduate school (Cerezo, Lyda, Beristianos, Enriquez, & Connor, 2013).
Research indicates that the racial disparities in educational outcomes in high school amplify during college, especially in institutions with predominantly White enrollments (Allen, 1992; Kugelmass & Ready, 2011). SOC are subjected to racial harassment, pressures to segregate, as well as assimilate, and are targeted as model, as well as inferior minorities (Museus & Park, 2015). Scholars describe these rituals, as well as other subtle messages or communications that are demeaning in nature, as racial microaggressions that severely undermine academic success (Harwood, Huntt, Mendenhall, & Lewis, 2012; Sue et al., 2007). Clark, Mercer, Zeigler-Hill, and Dufrene (2012) found that minority students experience higher levels of racial microaggressions than their peers, impacting perceptions of belongingness, academic engagement and performance, and mental health. Acts of racism, in overt and subtle forms, have been found to be predictive of adverse physical health, psychological well-being, and educational outcomes among ethnic minority higher education students, thus influencing their academic achievement and pathways to graduate programs (Chen et al., 2014; Dinh, Holmberg, Ho, & Haynes, 2013; Lee, Corneille, Hall, Yancu, & Myers, 2016; Mount, 2015; Pieterse, Todd, Neville, & Carter, 2012.
These challenges exacerbate the lack of access that SOC have to higher education (Carnevale & Strohl, 2013). Moreover, SOC are overrepresented in schools and colleges that are unable to offer either the academic guidance or the classes that appropriately prepare students for admission tests and graduate careers (Breneman, 1998; McDonough & Fann, 2007; Perna & Titus, 2005; Strayhorn, 2011).
In addition to being hamstrung in their preparation for doctoral programs, SOC face significant institutional challenges in the admission process. Inequitable merit expectations in admissions criteria, such as a heavy reliance on Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores (Posselt, 2014), often discourage minority students from applying to graduate programs, especially given the lower average GRE scores among many minority groups (Benjamin, 2004). Lack of funding constitutes another significant barrier for potential students (Thyer & Wilson, 2001), especially SOC who come from socioeconomically challenged backgrounds (Vasquez et al., 2006). Finally, limited mentorship opportunities restrict the pipeline to doctoral education. The lack of faculty diversity across programs dampens the enthusiasm of SOC seeking to apply to graduate program (Meuth, 2009; Turner, 2013).
Barriers to Retaining Ethnic Minority Students in PhD Programs
Misalignment of programs with career aims and the choice of specialization, lack of nurturing relationships with faculty, a dearth of peer support and interaction, and inadequate financial support have been found to be barriers to completing graduate school (Proctor & Truscott, 2012). Scholars have found that SOC experience these challenges at disproportionate rates and in more intense ways (Chen et al., 2014; Leyva, 2011; Nadal et al., 2014).
A dearth of faculty of color (FOC) continues to be one of the most significant barriers to degree completion for graduate SOC (Maton, Kohout, Wicherski, Leary, & Vinokurov, 2006; Munoz-Dunbar & Stanton, 1999; Speight, Thomas, Kennel, & Anderson, 1995). Research has highlighted the importance of mentoring in the success of graduate students (Gutierrez, 2012; Hesli, DeLaat, Youde, Mendez, & Lee, 2006; Paglis, Green, & Bauert, 2006). SOC are disadvantaged when they cannot develop these relationships, especially in institutions which struggle to attract and retain FOC.
Research indicates that the microaggressions that undermine the chances of SOC from successfully applying to doctoral programs also adversely affect their ability to complete their programs in graduate school (Franklin, Boyd-Franklin, & Kelly, 2006; Nadal et al., 2014; Seaton, Caldwell, Sellers, & Jackson, 2010; Solorzano et al., 2000; Sue, Lin, Torino, Capodilupo, & Rivera, 2009). Scholars have documented increased incidents of overt racism since 2015 (Garcia & Johnston-Guerrero, 2016), with these encounters often proving to be significant hurdles to staying engaged in education (Gutierrez & Poore, 1990) and communicating to SOC that they do not belong in graduate programs (Harwood et al., 2012).
Race and other social attributes such as gender, sexuality, class, and socioeconomic status may be manifesting themselves in complicated ways institutionally, undermining the success of SOC in subtle ways. Scholars have indicated that current dominant research processes in the social sciences, marked by restrictive ways to quantitatively measure social interactions, tend to underexamine and undertheorize the social processes connected to attributes such as race (Bonilla-Silva & Baiocchi, 2001; Harper, 2012). These scholarly blind spots may dissuade SOC from staying engaged with programs of research, systematically weeding out potential scholars of color interested in examining issues familiar to them from their own lived experiences (Shelton, 2011; Stoff & Cargill, 2016).
Addressing the Recruitment and Retention Challenges for Doctoral SOC
We believe that meeting the recruitment and retention challenges for doctoral SOC requires a multilevel response that addresses institutional and structural barriers in both spheres.
Negotiating recruitment and admissions challenges
Institutional responses
Scholars have highlighted the importance of recruiting from certain communities in order to expand the SOC pipeline into doctoral programs. These efforts depend on establishing connections to minority-serving institutions, organizing visits to campus for SOC, creating K–16 (kindergarten to college) pipelines to programs, attending professional fairs for SOC, expanding scholarships for SOC, and linking with schools with a large SOC population.
For SOC, FOC comprise a crucial conduit into doctoral programs. Not only are FOC a tangible sign that a school is safe and nurturing for SOC, the networks of student and social work scholars that they develop in their work often comprise the best pools for recruitment for a doctoral program. Strategies designed to attract SOC need to highlight the simultaneous need to increase the number of FOC in an institution.
These targeted recruitment efforts need to be supported institutionally. “Blind” admissions protocols whereby faculty on doctoral admission committees are discouraged from personally recruiting students need to be discouraged. These processes are usually justified by the argument that they guard against favoritism and enable all candidates to be “blindly” evaluated on merit. However, like most merit-based arguments, this line of reasoning fails to account for the biased landscape that disadvantages SOC from applying in the first place.
In conjunction with discouraging these blind admissions processes, institutions need to ensure that FOC are well represented in admissions committees. Most importantly, FOC on doctoral committees need to be encouraged to recruit from their mentee and scholarly networks and compensated adequately for their efforts. Unless the recruitment efforts undertaken by FOC count for workload offsets, FOC will continue to unfairly bear the burden of being the diversity caretakers in the discipline—a phenomenon that is racist in itself.
Admissions protocols need to rethink the emphasis on standardized scores. As research has continued to indicate, these scores are poor predictors of academic success, especially for SOC. In our own institution, a program in the medical school which discontinued the use of GRE scores in the admissions process saw an increase in SOC being admitted, with no change in outcomes such as students graduating on time, and successfully securing employment.
While these are strategies that can lead to SOC representation in a doctoral program, we argue that these efforts need to be supported and supplemented by structural measures in order to ensure that doctoral programs are accessible to SOC.
Structural responses
One of the significant structural barriers to diversifying doctoral pipelines is the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) requirement of a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree in order to teach some of the foundation MSW classes. Scholars have debated this issue (Shore & Thyer, 1997), with the defense of the CSWE position bolstered by the argument that the integrity of the discipline is at risk if foundational classes are taught by faculty without an MSW degree. We acknowledge that taking a position against this line of reasoning is controversial. However, we believe that this CSWE policy might ultimately have a chilling effect on the entry of people of color with experience in the social services, into the doctoral ranks. People of color who work in the social services and social justice field but do not hold an MSW degree are often at a disadvantage when they apply to doctoral programs in Social Work. The fact that they will be unable to teach some of the core MSW classes undermines their chances of being accepted into these programs. This requirement needs to be modified to allow more easily than is currently possible, qualified faculty with experience in the social services field to teach. Removing this gatekeeping device will make SOC who do not have MSWs more attractive candidates for doctoral programs, which in turn will benefit from their experience in social work-related fields of service and advocacy.
The challenge of linking scholarship to the world outside of that bounded by the walls of the academy comprises a significant barrier for people of color contemplating an academic career. This is a particularly vexing conundrum for promising doctoral candidates of color, precisely because of their engagement with communities through service and advocacy. How do peer-published papers translate to change in these communities? Why leave a career connected to service for an academic career that may not be linked to communities? Any attempt to help them answer these questions requires a reconceptualization of the academic track and the often fraught relationship between “town” and “gown.”
We believe that doctoral programs need to take to heart the community engagement directive enshrined in the original mission of land grant institutions of higher learning. If the salience of the community and the improvement of its most vulnerable denizens were to become a priority, then it follows that the research enterprise would have to be recast in order to mirror this change. While it is beyond the scope of this article to elucidate the precise contours of such a change, we speculate that for doctoral programs, the concept of what constitutes research, methods, dissertations, and publications would have to be reshaped. As examples, we draw on some of our own work as scholars engaged in marginalized communities in domestic and international settings. Over the course of the last five years, our research has been presented in “non-academic” settings such as unpublishable internal evaluation reports for city and state governments, spoken word performances, opinion pieces in newspapers, Facebook posts, workshops in sex work communities, and film scripts for Netflix and Amazon. As scholars of color, we determined (often in collaboration with the communities we have been working with) that these would be venues where our findings would have the most impact. We argue that doctoral programs that integrate this orientation to research and academic work-product will become more attractive to community-engaged candidates of color.
Negotiating retention challenges
Institutional responses
FOC play a crucial role as mentors in helping SOC complete their program of study. However, often forgotten in the discourse on mentorship is the manner in which cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional, and cross-generational mentorship teams allow SOC to negotiate institutional hurdles. The mentorship experience of the authors of this article is a good example of this. The authorship team represents a multigenerational mentorship team itself: one author is a current doctoral student of another, who in turn, was the doctoral student of the third. Moreover, the doctoral program mentors of the authors included faculty located in multiple institutions, from departments of social work, anthropology, sociology, medicine, education, and psychiatry. A mentorship team that crosses institutional silos allows SOC to receive guidance around institutionally blinkered perspectives. It also allows students access to a rich trove of research and interpersonal resources and opportunities which may not be available within one institution. For one of the authors, the heterogeneous mentorship team that was cultivated through a National Institutes of Health doctoral fellowship program eventually led to a postdoctoral position which allowed him to build on the academic collaborations initiated in the doctoral process. Moreover, we support Gutierrez’s (2012) call to replicate successful institutional mentorship programs, like the Mentoring Others Results in Excellence program at the University of Michigan. A mentorship process marked by substantive guidance, resources, and opportunities, makes academic futures tangible for SOC, enabling them to stay engaged in their doctoral career.
A crucial institutional measure to retain SOC is ensuring that they have access to the necessary research, writing, and analytical support during their doctoral years. The University of California has been lauded for the high rate of retention and academic achievement among its SOC, a level of success that it achieves through the extensive academic support it provides all SOC.
Structural responses
The discipline needs to protect the space that new graduates of doctoral programs occupy in it, since undermining that role will affect SOC disproportionately and weaken their motivation to complete their degrees. In our opinion, doctoral students in general, and SOC specifically, are vulnerable to two moves that have come to characterize the neoliberal university: (a) the push to replace tenure-lines with part-time instructors (Noble, 2000) and (b) the development of alternative doctoral degrees that are less focused on research and are populated by paying students, as opposed to doctoral candidates seeking a Ph.D., who are financially supported by the institution.
The creation of undercompensated teaching positions in universities, driven by the financial need to replace highly paid permanent faculty with non-permanent instructors, creates a precarious class of faculty populated by those who have just completed their degrees. Similarly, the establishment of the doctorate in social work (DSW) degree constitutes another strategy that is at least partially driven by the need to address shrinking revenue streams in academia. This too may have a chilling effect on the hiring potential of people graduating with a Ph.D. degree. People graduating with a DSW degree may well compete for teaching jobs that were previously in the domain of people with Ph.D. degrees, especially since such jobs are increasingly untenured and therefore, not permanent. The recent move by some social work programs possibly allowing students to enter DSW programs immediately after securing their MSW degrees, exacerbates the problem. Those who have been able to pay for an uninterrupted educational process starting at the premaster’s stage and culminating in a doctoral degree, without any postmaster’s clinical or rigorous doctoral research experience, will now potentially be competing for non-permanent teaching positions with recent graduates of Ph.D. programs.
There are serious implications to these moves, both for our discipline as a whole and for Ph.D.-awarding doctoral programs. It is possible that people of color who are already battling socioeconomic and race-related barriers in the job market are bound to suffer disproportionately. The reasons for completing a research-rigorous Ph.D. degree, usually after securing several years of postmaster’s experience in the social services field, may flounder in this new environment. The reason the DSW degree was terminated in schools all over the country was because it became redundant with the development of a rigorous Ph.D.—awarding academic culture. Any future that might undermine the rigor of the Ph.D. process also calls into question the logic of pipelining and retaining SOC into doctoral programs. At the structural level, the discipline needs to look closely into these implications, possibly lobbying for more tenured lines in order to stabilize the research enterprise and creating clear boundaries between the types of employment that are linked to the different types of doctoral degrees.
Discussion
SOC face several barriers to getting admitted to social work doctoral programs and successfully completing their doctoral degrees. Experiences of racism, financial hardship, and a dearth of academic support as well as mentorship undermine both the admissions and retention of SOC. We propose several strategies that engage with the current landscape of doctoral education in social work to address these challenges (Figure 1).
Addressing barriers for students of color in social work doctoral programs.
On the institutional level, increasing the number FOC to make a program more attractive to SOC, recruiting from academic environments that have greater proportions of SOC, expanding financial support, and discouraging evaluations based on standardized test scores can lead to an improved recruitment strategy for SOC. On the structural level, we argue that integrating research into community processes that SOC are already engaged in and allowing them to be able to teach MSW classes if they have had experience in providing social services will expand the pipeline of SOC to doctoral programs.
We propose that retention of SOC in doctoral programs will improve if institutions expand their academic support of SOC and utilize mentorship teams that are multidisciplinary and multigenerational. On the structural level, we advocate for the protection of disciplinary space for students graduating with a Ph.D. degree, cautioning against the expansion of part-time positions at the cost of tenure lines. Moreover, DSW programs, while meeting the need for practitioners who can teach advance practice classes (Thyer, 2015), might also be siphoning off candidates with practice experience who should be getting their Ph.D. degrees. This might, in the long run, undermine the emphasis doctoral programs should be placing on direct practice experience in communities of need, which ultimately will hamper efforts to recruit people of color into those programs.
We present these proposals, some of which may be unconventional and even controversial, in the hope that they initiate conversations that will shape the landscape of recruitment and retention of SOC in social work doctoral programs.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.