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After allegations of racism on campus led to demonstrations at the University of Missouri and Yale, protests have erupted on college campuses across the country, from Occidental College in California to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Among the common demands made by the student activists is that their schools try harder to hire more diverse and representative faculties.
Just how well do the professors at America’s top colleges reflect the country’s race and gender breakdowns? Each year, universities are required to report diversity data to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Department of Education. Unsurprisingly, the numbers show that the teaching staff at America’s universities are much whiter and much more male than the general population, with Hispanics and African Americans especially underrepresented. At some schools, like Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Princeton, there are more foreign teachers than Hispanic and black teachers combined. The Ivy League’s gender stats are particularly damning; men make up 68 percent and 70 percent of the teaching staff at Harvard and Princeton, respectively.
Here are the race and gender breakdowns of instructional staff at selected universities from the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent data available. A racial breakdown of the entire US population can be found at the bottom of the chart.
A few notes about the data: These charts include the 20 four-year universities with the biggest instructional staffs and the eight Ivy League universities. They also include the University of Missouri. The “other” category includes individuals who are Native American, Pacific Islander, multiracial, or declined to report their race. The US population stats come from the Census, which doesn’t separate “foreign” from other races.
In cases where there is more than one campus in a university system, the data shows the diversity of faculty on the main campus. (The campus names that have been shortened are the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the University of Florida, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Colorado-Denver, the University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus, Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus, the University of Washington-Seattle Campus, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick.)
Want to find a university that’s not on the chart? Hang tight! We’re working on making available the diversity data from more than 3,000 colleges and universities.
