Many say they support DEI. Far fewer are meeting their goals.
An informal group of academics who call themselves Next Generation Assessment conducted a survey to find out what colleges are doing to support DEI efforts. Their findings also offer a measure of how well administrators think these efforts are working.
The survey included responses from 118 colleges, 86 percent of which were four-year public or private colleges. The remaining 14 percent were two-year colleges. Nearly half of all colleges surveyed qualified as minority-serving institutions.
Lots of colleges say they support diversity, equity, and inclusion, the study found: Nearly three-quarters of the colleges responded that their mission statement “explicitly supports diversity, equity, and/or inclusion.”
But only a fifth of respondents said their colleges were making expected progress toward meeting their DEI goals, according to the survey.
Change comes slowly in higher education, Tammie Cumming, one of the founders of Next Generation Assessment, wrote in an email to The Chronicle, but colleges need to focus on the gap in graduation rates between Black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers.
The six-year graduation rate for Asian students is 74 percent, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, and 64 percent for white students. For Hispanic students, that figure is 54 percent, and for Black students, 40 percent.
Not every DEI office is the same.
About 90 percent of the respondents indicated they have an office dedicated to DEI measures, the survey’s authors told The Chronicle. But how colleges employ staff and programs to improve campus climate for underserved students varies widely, the survey found.
Slightly less than half of the colleges surveyed had “culturally relevant programs or centers,” according to the study, and 45 percent were using data to identify achievement gaps between students of different races. About the same percentage were analyzing what the biggest challenges to retention and completion are for underserved students on their campuses. ‘
Just 42 percent of the respondents said their college is using DEI staff to develop such plans and programming on campus.
Even at colleges that have DEI offices, or that support DEI programs, other evidence reveals that those expenditures make up a small part of an institution’s overall budget. A Chronicle analysis found that the costs of all activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion at Florida’s 12 public universities was less than 1 percent of their spending.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, required universities to report that data to state lawmakers. The request is seen as one of several efforts by DeSantis to identify and eliminate a liberal bias in higher education. Lawmakers in at least two other states, South Carolina and Oklahoma, have made similar requests of public colleges.
Several other states, including Florida, Iowa, Texas and West Virginia, are considering bills to prohibit spending on staff, or in some cases, programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses.
Faculty support is lacking.
Issues around curriculum and faculty hiring and retention were the biggest challenges, the survey found.
Less than a quarter of the colleges that responded had done a systematic review of their curriculum to “identify issues in diversity and inclusion.” Nor had they done a review of their student testing and grading policies to consider if they were fair and equitable.
Only a third of the responding colleges provided “professional development for faculty in understanding the experiences of diverse students in their classrooms,” the study found. Just 13 percent had “mechanisms and supportive measures for retaining faculty of color.”
Having a diverse faculty is one key to helping students of color succeed in college, according to a report from the Education Trust. But the diversity of tenure-track faculty members continues to lag, according to a paper published last year in the journal Nature Human Behavior. At the current rate, that study’s authors wrote, higher education will “never achieve demographic parity among tenure-track faculty.”
—Eric Kelderman
