Increasing Faculty Diversity The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Stephen Cole is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. At the time of her death, Elinor Barber was a research associate in the Provost's Office at Columbia University.A vexing problem in American academia is how to ensure the adequate representation of minority groups in higher education, not only among students but even more importantly among faculty. Cole and Barber do those concerned with this issue a tremendous service by providing concrete information about the process by which minority students go on to become college and university professors. While many have offered policies to improve minority representation in the professoriate, theirs are the only recommendations to be grounded in hard facts and solid empirical research.
- Douglas Massey, coauthor of <i>American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass</i>,
<i>Increasing Faculty Diversity</i> confronts a perplexing issue—why the racial/ethnic composition of American college and university faculty is not representative of the American population—in a thoughtful and systematic way. In the process it dispels a number of popular myths and offers a concrete menu of steps that should be taken if academia wants to diversify its faculty. Readers interested in polemics should look elsewhere: here they will find an important social issue analyzed in a dispassionate way.
- Ronald Ehrenberg, author of <i>Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much</i>,
In recent years, colleges have successfully increased the racial diversity of their student bodies. They have been less successful, however, in diversifying their faculties. This book identifies the ways in which minority students make occupational choices, what their attitudes are toward a career in academia, and why so few become college professors.
Working with a large sample of high-achieving minority students from a variety of institutions, the authors conclude that minority students are no less likely than white students to aspire to academic careers. But because minorities are less likely to go to college and less likely to earn high grades within college, few end up going to graduate school. The shortage of minority academics is not a result of the failure of educational institutions to hire them; but of the very small pool of minority Ph.D. candidates. In examining why some minorities decide to become academics, the authors conclude that same-race role models are no more effective than white role models and that affirmative action contributes to the problem by steering minority students to schools where they perform relatively poorly. They end with policy recommendations on how more minority students might be attracted to an academic career.