By J. Nathan Matias, Neil Lewis Jr., Elan Hope
U.S. universities have made public commitments to recruit and retain faculty of color. Analysis of three federal datasets shows that at current rates, diversity in U.S. faculty will never reach racial parity. Yet colleges and universities could achieve parity by 2050 by diversifying their faculty at 3.5 times the current pace.
In this paper, we examine whether the pipeline hypothesis is a sufficient explanation for the lack of diversity in American universities by combining three comprehensive national data sets to build models of faculty diversity, and projections of how diversity might (or might not change) in the future. First, we model the changes in faculty diversity from 2013 to 2021 for all higher education, institution groups, and individual institutions. Second, we use U.S. Census projections to examine whether faculty diversity trajectories are making higher education more diverse, or whether further interventions might be necessary to move those trajectories toward demographic parity. Finally, we estimate the number of qualified underrepresented minority faculty that are available for universities to hire if they chose to.
This repository includes the analysis, code, data, and initial drafts in LaTeX form. This is not the canonical link for the project— see instead the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/ar8pt/
Figure 1: U.S. higher education will never achieve demographic parity among tenure-track faculty at current rates of change (n= 1,250, p<0.0001,R2 = 0.99). Panels show estimated rates of change for all U.S. Institutions, Liberal Arts Colleges, Ivy+ Institutions , and R1 Institutions. Within an institution group, gray lines are individual institutions, green lines are the projected trend for the group, and orange lines are example institutions near the median rate of change for the group. Solid lines are observed trends, and dashed lines are projections.