Research Collaborator
Aya M. Waller-Bey is an Annenberg Institute Research Collaborator at Brown University. A qualitative sociologist of race and higher education, she studies the ways in which the college admissions essay serves as a critical site of racialization and Black student meaning-making in the admissions process. Her current work also explores how trauma in college admissions essays informs definitions of merit and worthiness, with future work examining the experiences and outcomes of Black students applying to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and historically and predominantly white institutions (HPWI) post-race-conscious admissions. Her research has been funded by the American Sociological Association's Minority Fellowship Program, the Ford Foundation's Pre-Doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.
She has co-authored work in the Annual Review of Sociology and published a solo-authored review in Contexts. She has also published op-eds in The Atlantic, The Detroit Free Press, and Forbes, and her work and expertise have been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, Slate, and other notable publications. Waller-Bey’s work is informed by her tenure as an admissions officer at Georgetown University and her decade-long work in college advising and college admissions consulting. She also regularly gives invited talks on postsecondary diversity, affirmative action, and equity in higher education, as well as workshops on college essay writing, in metro Detroit and throughout the country. Before beginning her doctoral work, she served as a University Innovation Fellow at Arizona State University and held various roles at the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America Summer Institute at Princeton University.
Waller-Bey holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University of Michigan. She also holds an M.Phil. in Education from the University of Cambridge, where she received the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She completed her B.A. in Sociology from Georgetown University.
