Trends in Academic Employment
The reports in this section, developed by CSAL faculty affiliate John W. Curtis, provide summaries of trends in academic employment as well as a working paper examining trends in faculty diversity in relation to degree outcomes for minoritized students. The reports include supporting data files to enable further analysis.
Trends in Faculty Diversity, 1995-2019
By John W. Curtis
Data report, November 2021
A comprehensive tabulation of national data on faculty employment status by racial category, institution type, student enrollment, and the intersection of racial and gender categories.
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Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2021
By John W. Curtis
Data report, November 2021
Update and expansion of a 2006 report. A comprehensive tabulation of national data on academic employment by gender from 1995-2019 in the form of four equity indicators: employment status, both by institutional category and full- or part-time status; tenure status; achievement of full professor rank; and salary for full-time faculty members.
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The Long-Term Trend in Contingent Faculty Employment
By John W. Curtis
Data report, November 2021
The national trend in academic employment status from 1975 to 2019. Includes separate tabulations for instructional staff, including graduate student employees, and faculty, broken out by institution type.
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Faculty Diversity and Minoritized Student Outcomes: An Analysis of Institutional Factors
By John W. Curtis
Working Paper, November 2021
Abstract
This paper describes an attempt to utilize the US Department of Education’s IPEDS census data on faculty employment in a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the association between “faculty diversity” and degree outcomes for minoritized students. The paper first reviews (and critiques) recent calls to diversify the faculty and then reviews some of the published research on minoritized student success. The literature review suggests that existing studies, both qualitative and quantitative, are limited and do not clearly specify the mechanism by which faculty diversity is expected to improve outcomes for minoritized students.
The paper first sets the context for the analysis with updated comprehensive tabulations of the trends in bachelor’s degree awards and faculty employment, broken out by racial category and type of institution. Given the overrepresentation of African American and Latinx faculty members at minority-serving institutions, the analysis then proceeds to regression models of degrees awarded to students in those two racial categories by predominantly white institutions. The regression models for 2016-17 degree awards indicate that greater representation of African American faculty at PWIs is associated with larger proportions of degrees to African Americans, but the same is not true for Latinx faculty representation. Models of the change in the proportion of degrees awarded over 20 years do not show a statistically significant effect of changes in minoritized faculty representation, likely due to the small amount of change that has actually occurred. The paper describes a number of challenges for the quantitative analysis of institutional “diversity,” not least of which is the problematic racial categories available in the data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of the analysis and what it tells us about efforts to diversify the faculty.
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About the Author
John W. Curtis is an independent research and evaluation consultant based in Washington, DC. He is a faculty affiliate of the Department of Economics and Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University, and faculty affiliate of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to starting his consulting practice, Dr. Curtis served as research director for the American Sociological Association (2014-2017) and American Association of University Professors (2002-2014). In earlier years, he held positions in institutional research at community colleges in Montana and Virginia, and as research associate at the Universität Bayreuth in Germany and the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Curtis completed a Ph.D. in sociology at Johns Hopkins University with a specialization in international development.
Email: jwcurtis@colostate.edu