FAEIS Newsletter

September 28, 2009

In This Issue:

Upcoming FAEIS Peer Panel Meeting

Diversity in the Administrative Faculty Ranks

Greetings from the FAEIS team at Virginia Tech. If you are not familiar with this important project from USDA/CSREES, click here to read about FAEIS and why it is important to you.

Upcoming FAEIS Peer Panel Meeting

The 2009 meeting of the FAEIS Peer Panel will take place on November 17 and 18, at the end of the annual Association for Public and Land-grant Universities (formerly NASULGC) meeting being held in Washington D.C. If you have a topic you would like for the Peer Panel to discuss at this meeting, please contact your organizational representative or the FAEIS office. Learn more about the Peer Panel here.

Diversity in the Administrative Faculty Ranks

This month we looked at the racial make–up of administrative and non-administrative faculty by program area using the 2008 FAEIS Data. Each of the two tables below includes all of the institutions that reported their faculty in the FAEIS Faculty Survey.

The 2008 FAEIS data reveals that the ranks of administrative faculty include less minorities when compared with non-administrative faculty for all three of the major FAEIS program areas (1) Agriculture, Agriculture Operations, and related Sciences, 2) Family Consumer Sciences /Human Sciences, 3) Natural Resources and Conservation).

Also, our data points out that there are more minority faculty in the FCS/HS program area for both faculty types when compared to the other two program areas (Agriculture, and Natural Resources).  The Natural Resources and Conservation Program area had the least amount of minority faculty of the three program areas for both faculty types.

Another interesting finding is that among non-administrative faculty in all three program areas, people of Asian descent are the largest minority group, but for administrative faculty in all three program areas, African Americans are the largest minority group.

It is also interesting to compare the percentages of faculty members by race to the U.S. Census data for the general population. The July 2008 estimates are: Caucasian, (not Hispanic) - 65.6%; Black (not Hispanic) 12.2%; American Indian, Alaskan Native (not Hispanic) - 0.8%; Asian (not Hispanic) - 4.4%; Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander (not Hispanic) - 0.1%; Two or more races (not Hispanic) - 1.5%; Hispanic (of any race) 15.4%.

Click here is see the actual head counts by faculty type, program area and by race.

Trends

Since the tables above only represent the 2008 faculty data, we decided to also look at the trends for administrative and non-administrative faculty by race. The charts below use the same set of 54 universities for both faculty types. These 54 institutions had reported faculty data for each of the 5 years of this analysis.

Click here to see the list of institutions and specific head counts by race.

Number of Non-Administrative Faculty for Selected Institutions by Racial Group, 2004-2008

Looking within each racial group, the chart above shows an 6.6% percent increase (from 5,938 to 6,580) in the number of Caucasian faculty in non-administrative roles between 2004 and 2008, while the number of minority faculty increased by 37.4% during the same period (from 689 to 947).

Percentages of Non-Administrative Faculty for Selected Institutions by Racial Group, 2004-2008

Looking at the percentage of minority, non-administrative faculty compared to the total non-administrative faculty there was an increase from 11.6% in 2004 to 14.4 % in 2008. The percentage of Caucasian non-administrative faculty decreased from 88.2% to 84.8% over the same time period.

Number of Administrative Faculty for Selected Institutions by Racial Group, 2004-2008

The chart above shows an 8.1% increase in the number of Caucasian faculty in administrative roles between 2004 and 2008 (269 to 291). For the same period, minority faculty in administrative roles grew by 10.5% (19 to 21).

Percentages of Administrative Faculty for Selected Institutions by Racial Group, 2004-2008

However, the percentage of minority administrative faculty compared to the total number of administrative faculty stayed fairly stable with 6.6% in 2004 and 6.7% in 2008.

Click here is see the list of institutions included in this report.

Have a question?

Ask FAEIS