Giving Compass' Take:

• Cornell University is actively recruiting students to increase the diversity of their applicants and a stronger program. 

• How can other schools, businesses, and organizations use this model to increase their diversity and the strength of their applicants? 

• Find out how diversity can full the tech talent gap.

When a professor posted a Twitter thread about how Cornell University improved diversity in its computer-science PhD program, it quickly went viral.

Computer science is “not just white dudes slinging code, and we all suffer for it when the world thinks that’s what it is,” Bindel wrote.

So how did Cornell do it? Bindel tells EdSurge that last year, Cornell had one Native American applicant, four African American and 17 hispanic applicants to its computer science PhD program, out of a pool of about 850 people. To encourage greater diversity in the next class. Bindel reached out to coordinators of the McNair Scholars Program, an organization that seeks to get undergraduate students—many of whom are underrepresented in graduate education—ready for graduate studies across the United States.

Bindel tapped into his personal network as well, which to some extent involved friends who now teach at different institutions. He also reached out to current Cornell computer science graduate students who had contacts.

Bindel says the rest of the application-and-review process was “pretty standard.” However, the committee added two new questions to the evaluations this year. The first was on how well the students had done with the opportunities they had.

The idea was somebody who went through Stanford and sat in the back of a research group, then got their name on a couple of papers might not actually have done as impressive a job with the resources that they had as somebody who didn’t necessarily get a paper out, but did really impressive research as an undergraduate at a university where they had less mentoring.

The committee also considered if the applicant brought a unique perspective to their research area. Bindel says both of those questions did affect decisions for some students.

“It wasn’t just that this got us more underrepresented minorities; it got us different students,” he says.

“Overall, we actually got more selective this year than we did last year,” Bindel says.

Read the full article about diversifying the PhD computer science student body by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge.