According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, only 16 percent of full-time professors at postsecondary institutions are minorities. That means that 84 percent of those in full-time professorships are White, 60 percent are men and 24 percent are women.
Outside of ethnicity and growth, the study also found that the wage gender gap between men and women professors was well north of $16,000. Less than half of America’s private and non-private postsecondary institutions had tenure systems, faculty at for-profit colleges and universities make far less than those at non-profit schools, and less than 10 percent of all faculty within higher education are employed at for-profit institutions.
What’s striking is the gross underrepresentation of minority professors at America’s higher education schools. While many may be concentrated within historically Black colleges and universities or schools who have a high number of Black students, that percentage makes barely a dent in the overall number of Black, Asian, Hispanic and American indigenous who may teach at America’s best schools of higher learning.
So what’s going on here?
Faculty positions are extremely competitive. Colleges and universities often value professors that have publishing ability, or a strong past of publication, over actual teaching methods. This is not to say that there are not women and minorities with high qualifications but rather to point out that sometimes sex and race are simply not part of the hiring equation.
Facts and figures on a résumé are tangible ways to show what a particular candidate can bring to the job. It is more difficult for higher education decision-makers to gauge the benefit of a person’s background or life experience on the students that pay good money to learn at a particular institution.
