The Global Postgraduate Diversity Resource was created by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), with support from the Educational Testing Service (ETS), as a tool to help universities improve their diversity and inclusion programming by looking at resources written by university leaders, researchers, government officials, and journalists.
The idea came out of the 2018 Strategic Leaders Global Summit on Graduate Education, co-sponsored by CGS, ETS, and the University of Johannesburg, which explored a range of issues related to diversity in master’s and doctoral education. Summit topics included clarifying and comparing definitions of diversity and inclusion, creating an inclusive campus and program culture, student recruitment, curriculum and pedagogy, retention and completion, and supporting successful career paths for all students. Under the theme, Supporting Diversity in Graduate Education, participants in the summit discussed current strategies for improving diversity, existing roadblocks, and future priorities.
The website was also conceived to help faculty, postgraduate students, and administrators develop a common language for improving diversity and inclusion at postgraduate institutions around the world. Beyond the difficulties of locating web resources on postgraduate diversity and inclusion, different ways of talking about these topics gave the impression that global advocates were talking past one another instead of engaging around common challenges. Our hope is that by more clearly articulating what we mean by postgraduate diversity and inclusion, we can engage in a more fruitful global dialogue on how to provide a better education to students from around the world.
