The PhD Pipeline Initiative Works: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention to Help Underrepresented Students Prepare for PhDs in Political Science

Enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is a priority for political science. However, recruitment of historically underrepresented graduate students, and subsequently faculty, remains lackluster. While numerous initiatives, such as the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, have helped address the inequities, biases, and obstacles that perpetuate the lack of diversity in academia, the question remains how to create a successful, sustainable, and scalable intervention that can reach a broader population. This article introduces the Pipeline Initiative in Political Science, which was evaluated using the first randomized trial of a political science pipeline intervention. The program successfully recruited first-generation and underrepresented students, who were then admitted through a random lottery to the one-semester program. The program resulted in a 48.9 percentage point increase in the number of students who felt prepared to apply to PhD programs and helped students dramatically improve their application materials, thus increasing their chance of admission to graduate school.