Any search for data begins with a mystery. We think we have an idea of what the current trends in higher education are. But will the numbers confirm our imaginings? Or send us in another direction?
Numbers tell the story of the current state of higher education: the results of its diversity efforts, the decline in enrollment, and the growth in student debt.
One of the central questions explored in the 2018 issue of the Almanac of Higher Education is whether colleges have made significant progress on diversity in the past several years. The answer is mixed.
Over all, colleges are getting closer to having a majority of minorities. In 2016, more than 43 percent of college students were members of racial and ethnic minority groups, an increase of more than six percentage points from 2010.
The increase can be attributed primarily to the enrollment of nearly 850,000 more Hispanic students than were in college six years earlier. The number of Asians also rose. But the numbers of black students, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians fell significantly.
And who is teaching this multiracial group? A faculty that is nearly 78 percent white. Newly hired instructional staff members are only 72 percent white, suggesting that colleges continue to take small steps toward inclusiveness.
The people who manage professors and other college employees are no more diverse than the faculty. And the doctorate recipients who are most likely to get jobs in academe, the ones with degrees in the humanities and arts, were more than 79 percent white in 2016. So it looks as if the rate of faculty diversification will continue to significantly trail that of the students.
Among reasons for encouragement in the higher-education sector is that the number of men, long underrepresented among college students, grew from 2010 to 2016, by more than 12,000. At the same time, though, the number of women fell by nearly 100,000. A number of colleges have been stung by enrollment losses. Some of them ended up with low scores on the U.S. Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test. Several have closed, as have a good number of for-profit institutions, known for enrolling high numbers of minorities and women.
But all students have a higher chance than they did a decade earlier of being enrolled at an institution led by a woman. In the past year, more than a third of the people appointed as college presidents were female.
If you find progress for women in these pages, you will also find matters of concern. One issue is that women, on average, bear a larger financial burden in going to college than men do. As Julia Piper explains in the article that introduces the Students section, women need to earn one more degree than men do to match men’s earnings. That disparity helps explain why women owe about two-thirds of the country’s $1.4 trillion in student-loan debt.
Let’s put aside that grim thought to consider for a moment that a team of researchers has found that some colleges truly are life-transforming, at least in the economic realm. One of the tables in the Students section lists the institutions that have been most successful in raising the financial status of students from the poorest families.
As you browse the Almanac, you will be likely to veer from positive thoughts to worried ones, much as this essay does. If your goal is to see how your college compares with others, check out some of our 30 tables that rank institutions on various measures, like rapid enrollment growth and graduation rates. And then do what you want with the numbers you find in this issue. Jot them down, bring them up in strategy meetings, show them to your legislators. And see if you can use them to solve any of your own mysteries.
Ruth Hammond is editor of the Almanac of Higher Education. Follow her on Twitter at @ruthehammond.
Return to the Almanac home page, or go to the Profession, Students, Finance, or States section. To purchase a copy of the Almanac in print or as a downloadable interactive PDF, visit the Chronicle Store. Help guide us to give you the data you need by taking our 10-minute online Almanac survey.
