By Jonathan Lai / Staff Writer
Colleges have enrolled increasingly diverse student bodies, reflecting shifts in the nation’s demographics and efforts to make higher education more accessible to all. But change has been slow at the faculty level, and increasingly diverse students are being taught by largely white professors.
College enrollment is growing more diverse, but once on campus, minority students often have to look hard to find professors that look like them.
Nationally, about 79 percent of full-time college professors are white, teaching an undergraduate population that is about 62 percent white. “If there’s nobody there who looks like you, the possibility is that that’s because you won’t succeed. You don’t belong,” says Phoebe A. Haddon, the chancellor of Rutgers-Camden and the first black woman in that role.
The disparity can cause students to ask themselves: “Can I succeed here? Because by inference, if there’s nobody there who looks like you, the possibility is that that’s because you won’t succeed. You don’t belong,” said Phoebe A. Haddon, the chancellor of Rutgers-Camden and the first black woman in that role.
At four-year colleges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, about 70 percent of undergraduates with known races and ethnicities were white in the 2013-14 school year, the last year for which comprehensive data are available from the federal Department of Education; 81 percent of professors were white.
Compared with the prior decade, faculty did become more diverse, but not at a pace that kept up with changing student enrollment. The gap has actually grown.
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