The sortable table below shows the percentages of full-time faculty members who were members of specific racial and ethnic groups at degree-granting colleges and universities in November 2021.
About these data
This table includes all degree-granting two- and four-year institutions in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., that are eligible for federal aid. The data are from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Total full-time faculty members include all staff members whose primary occupation is classified as instruction, research, or public service. This includes those with and without faculty status.
The full titles of the racial and ethnic categories are: white non-Hispanic; Black or African American non-Hispanic; Hispanic or Latino; Asian non-Hispanic; American Indian or Alaska Native; Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander; two or more races; and race/ethnicity unknown. White can include faculty members of North African or Middle Eastern ethnicity. Those eight categories include both U.S. citizens and permanent residents. “Nonresident” covers people described by the Education Department as “Nonresident aliens": those of all racial and ethnic groups who are in the United States on a visa or temporary basis and do not have the right to remain indefinitely. A person may be counted in only one of these groups. Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.
“Total minority” is the percentage of all faculty members who are nonwhite and whose race is known. As noted above, this value would not include faculty of North African or Middle Eastern descent. It includes those who are two or more races; it does not include “nonresident aliens” as their ethnicity or race is unknown.
Some colleges reported a large number of their faculty members in the “race/ethnicity unknown” category. In those cases, all of the other figures should be interpreted with caution. However, some studies indicate that many people reported in that column are white but chose not to identify their race. If that is true, the percentages shown for racial minorities would tend to be accurate.
Type categories are from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Values for 2021 use the 2021 groupings, while earlier years use the 2018 classifications. Groups are the same across these two sets, but institutions may have moved to a new group between the 2018 and 2021 versions. “Special focus” includes both two-year and four-year special-focus institutions. “Associate” also includes those institutions classified as “baccalaureate/associate.”