The following post and data visualization is by guest blogger Lisa Bernardo, highlighting her project for Prof. Harmon’s Economics Independent Study class.

This project aimed to analyze diversity of student enrollment versus faculty members at research universities in the United States.  Through our research and analysis, we wanted to determine whether the make up of the student population in terms of race and ethnicity was well represented within that of faculty members.  This was done by calculating race and ethnicity shares of undergraduate students and faculty members from the years 2001 through 2014 using data downloaded from the IPEDS Data Center.

From our analysis, it was concluded that the shares of black and Hispanic faculty members remained significantly below these shares for students consistently over the time period of 2001 to 2014.

We also found that shares of black and Hispanic students as well as faculty members did show significant increases from 2002 to 2014, though the faculty increase lagged the student increase.  The black and Hispanic enrollment share for undergraduate students increased from 4.04 percentage points from 14.87% in 2002 to 18.91% in 2014.  Whereas, this same share for faculty members only increased 3.16 percentage points from 12.65% in 2002 to 15.81% in 2014.