Why AMIGA?

Across the U.S. higher education administrators and faculty are leading initiatives that focus on expanding faculty ranks with individuals from a wider range of different perspectives and backgrounds. Although graduate study is a significant part of the pipeline to becoming a faculty member, graduate education and admissions specifically, have received little attention.

In 2020 social inequality and access to resources manifested nationally with the realization that people of color are more likely to catch COVID-19. Moreover, racial injustice exposed the extent that black and brown people experience policing and other forms of institutional racism. Students, staff and faculty alike have long pondered, "What can one do to foster social justice in academia?"

Demographic forecasts detail a significantly changing US population by 2050. In California, public colleges and universities are already enrolling substantial numbers of college students who have been underrepresented in higher education. The Alliance for Multi-campus, Inclusive Graduate Admissions (AMIGA) project focuses on supporting holistic graduate admissions to increase access to graduate education and to develop more opportunities to becoming faculty.

To that end, the AMIGA project supports equitable holistic review methods for graduate admissions that potentially open access to graduate school for students from a wider variety of backgrounds, such as those who are first generation college or have experienced significant economic hardship. It is only with attention to equitable methods that institutions can select faculty from a pool of candidates with increasingly different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences while preparing the brightest minds to tackle society’s most intractable problems.