According to a new paper from the Brown Center Chalkboard at Brookings, Black and Hispanic Americans receive well below their share of doctorates. Although the share is increasing it will take another 22 years for Black doctorates to reach parity and another 90 years for Hispanics.

As a rough calculation, the Black share rose from 43% to 79% in 39 years—a rate of almost 1 percentage point a year—with a remaining gap of 21 percentage points. The same calculation among Hispanics suggests it would take 90 years to reach parity.

Dick Startz, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues in "Progress on diversity in the doctoral pipeline is slow" that while only 2% of the adult U.S. population hold a doctorate, those that do wield considerable influence on education, from early childhood through postsecondary studies.

"About 10% of public school principals hold a doctorate as do more than half of superintendents," Startz wrote. "On college and university campuses, who teaches students especially matters–research shows that students of color benefit from having a professor, law school instructor, or teaching assistant “like me”, with associated improvements in student performance and persistence in educational attainment. Outside of education, racial match affects health outcomes for children and their families, with Black patients reporting longer and more participatory appointments from a same-race doctor."

The report “Faculty Diversity and Student Success Go Hand in Hand, So Why are University Faculties So White?” examines representation, hiring, and tenure equity at universities over time and shows that little to no progress has been made toward increasing faculty diversity in American higher education.

According to Ed Trust’s research, all students benefit from having diverse faculty. Black and Latino students are going to college in greater numbers and they are more likely to graduate when they have faculty members who look like them and can serve as positive mentors and role models.

White students who interact with diverse faculty are more likely to develop deeper cross-cultural and critical-thinking skills and greater levels of empathy, which are essential for success in today’s multicultural and multiracial world.

When Ed Trust researchers compared the racial and ethnic composition of an institution’s faculty against that of its student body and graded them, they found that more than half (57%) of the institutions had failing grades for Black faculty diversity, while over three-quarters (79%) had F grades for Latino faculty diversity.

While few policies at the state and federal levels directly address faculty diversity, there are ways that higher education leaders can not only boost faculty diversity but use it to improve college completion. Baseline recommendations from the report on faculty diversity and student success include:

With the nation recently reflecting on the legacy of MLK, it's worth taking a moment to examine progress on diversity in the doctoral pipeline.@ProfitOfEd examines whether American doctoral programs have achieved rough racial & ethnic parity. https://t.co/vEYvkfRZrd

— Brookings Governance (@BrookingsGov) January 19, 2023

Black & Latino faculty are severely underrepresented at most public, four-year colleges & universities. In this report we examine ways that college leaders, policymakers, & advocates can improve #FacultyDiversity https://t.co/CuuKBLRXAQ

— The Education Trust (@EdTrust) January 15, 2023