Essay Understanding Diversity within the Higher Education Faculty Pipeline
Subtitle
An Essay for the Learning Curve
Sarah Parsons
Display Date
File
File
Download essay
(223.93 KB)

For colleges and universities across the United States, incoming freshman classes are already beginning to look different than they ever have before. No racial or ethnic group makes up a majority of people younger than 18, and as a result, incoming cohorts of students will continue to be more diverse racially and ethnically. As more underrepresented students attend college, their academic success will be supported by having diverse instructors. But their instructors remain overwhelmingly white.

Racial and ethnic diversity among faculty members holds several benefits for college students. Evidence shows that having diverse professors and teachers positively affects academic success for students of color and other underrepresented backgrounds. Currently, higher education institutions are increasing faculty from underrepresented backgrounds at a rate of just 0.23 percentage points a year. In part, this slow rate stems from the barriers to entry, and part of the reason that faculty diversity hasn’t remained in step with increasing student diversity is the racial and ethnic makeup of many PhD graduate programs. And although student enrollment has become more racially diverse across the board, these shifts are not uniform in every degree program.

Universities seeking to diversify their academic faculty face a shortage of candidates from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in many academic fields. Comparing the graduation rates for common degree programs at the bachelor’s and doctoral levels across race and ethnicity could provide insight into the implications that racial and ethnic disparities in PhD programs may hold for equitable faculty hiring.

Key Findings

2019 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System Completions Survey data show the following:

  • Business, education, public administration, theology and religious studies, health professions, natural resources, and agriculture all produce larger shares of Black doctoral graduates than earned bachelor’s degrees.
  • Hispanic graduates have a higher share of doctoral degrees than bachelor’s degrees in theology and religious studies, where the share of Hispanic doctoral degree recipients is about 0.3 percentage points higher than the share of bachelor’s degree recipients.
  • The fields that have the lowest shares of Black and Hispanic doctoral recipients when compared with their share of earned bachelor’s degrees include sociology, communication, political science, and visual and performing arts. Sociology and communication programs awarded the second- and third-highest shares of bachelor’s degrees to Black students, respectively, with sociology having the largest difference between bachelor’s and doctoral recipients (7 percentage points). In sociology, more than a quarter of bachelor’s degrees are earned by Hispanic students, yet the share of doctoral recipients is 16 percentage points lower.
  • Analyzing only research-intensive universities—which produce the majority of PhD degrees and are the source of most faculty candidates—8 economics PhDs were awarded to Black candidates and 20 to Hispanic candidates, 7 Black candidates received a PhD in physics, and 20 Black candidates and 24 Hispanic candidates earned PhDs in computer science.

Implications

The low numbers of Black and Hispanic students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines are aligned with the low numbers of Black and Hispanic students in bachelor’s programs, suggesting that first step to diversifying STEM faculty requires enrolling and supporting more students of color in bachelor’s-level STEM programs.

But in social science and humanities programs, despite being well represented in bachelor’s programs, students of color earn doctoral degrees at lower rates than they earn bachelor’s degrees. This indicates that these students are either not enrolling in graduate programs, are not admitted at proportional rates, or are not completing their programs. To diversify the faculty pool, we must understand what drives the drop-off between those who earn bachelor’s degrees and those who earn doctoral degrees.

Ultimately, creating a higher education faculty pool that matches the rapidly changing racial and ethnic makeup of enrolling students will require more than bolstering the number of PhD completions. One study found that more than 45,000 doctoral recipients after 2007 who are from underrepresented backgrounds were not hired into tenure-track positions, so ensuring a more diverse pool of potential faculty hires increases faculty diversity only if they are hired. Additional work is necessary to bridge the gaps between bachelor’s and doctoral degrees for Black and Hispanic students, but additional student support to increase completions and changed hiring practices to recruit more faculty of color are also vital.

Get the Data

Additional Resources

Research and Evidence Work, Education, and Labor
Expertise Higher Education
Tags Higher education Racial equity in education