Economics Faculties:
The Status of Racial Minorities

Gregory N. Price, Morehouse College

The last three decades have witnessed the formation of several organizations or committees to advance the status of racial minorities in the economics profession, including the National Economic Association (NEA), the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP), and the American Society of Hispanic Economists (ASHE).

A major impetus for each was the chronic underrepresentation of racial minorities in the economics profession, particularly on the economics faculties of U.S. colleges and universities. To help address this shortcoming, the organizations have focused efforts on creating a pipeline from doctoral degree to faculty positions for minority graduates. The question raised here is whether this pipeline is working.

Racial Minorities Underrepresented on Economics Faculties

Table 1 details the number of black and Hispanic full-time faculty in the 2006–2007 academic year. The data are compiled from institutions that responded to the AEA’s Universal Academic Questionnaire. Across all institutions, blacks and Hispanics constituted 1.9% and 2.7%, respectively, of all tenured and tenure-track economics faculty. Among nontenure-track faculty, blacks and Hispanics constituted 2.6% and 1.9%, respectively. The black share of tenured, tenure-track, and nontenure-track faculty is lowest among Ph.D. granting economics departments. For Hispanics, the tenured/tenure-track faculty share is lowest among M.A. granting institutions, and the nontenure-track faculty share is lowest among Ph.D. granting institutions.

Pipeline Issues Are Not the Only Roadblocks

One possible reason for the underrepresentation is that the pipeline feeding doctoral students into faculty positions is lacking or ineffective. Tables 1 and 2, however, suggest this is not the case, given that the 12-year average of those receiving doctorates (7.5%) exceeds their faculty shares in 2005–2006.

Of course, it is possible that, because Table 1 data are not a full sample of all colleges and universities, the black and Hispanic faculty share is actually higher. It could also be that the incomplete data in Table 1 omit hiring histories that reflect a commitment to affirmative action. In such a case, colleges and universities may have hired black and Hispanic economics professors in early years, and given their omission from the sample, the results are thus biased.

Underrepresentation is Ongoing

This underrepresentation is not new, as historical data reveal. Of the total economics faculty employed or ever known to be employed at 106 Ph.D.-granting economics departments ranked by the National Research Council (NRC) as of January 1, 2006, only 1.5% were black.1 Unfortunately, parallel data are unavailable for Hispanic economists.

More informative is the median number of blacks employed or ever employed in these institutions—zero. Given that the black share of earned doctorates on the hiring history was not zero, this suggests that even over a longer history, blacks have been underrepresented in economics faculties. To the extent that the historical black data in Tables 1 and 2 are similar for Hispanics, historical and contemporary minority underrepresentation on economics faculties is not likely fully explained by pipeline considerations.2

The data suggest current and historical barriers for economists from racial minority groups to gaining faculty appointments. In the case of blacks, for which historical data are available, there are more doctorates earned than faculty positions granted, particularly in Ph.D. granting programs. This raises the possibility that the historical and contemporary underrepresentation of racial minorities on economics faculties is not exclusively a supply-side pipeline problem.

Table 1:  Numbers and Distribution of Black and Hispanic Faculty by Type of Institution: 2006-2007

Table 2.  Percentage of Doctoral Degrees in Economics Awarded to Blacks and Hispanics: 1993-2004

1 See Table 2 in Gregory N. Price, “The Problem of the 21st Century: Economics Faculty and the Color Line,” working paper, Department of Economics, Morehouse College, 2007.

2 The summary data considered here are a mixture of small samples and a historical population, and neither informs the extent to which there is “leakage” of minority economics doctorates into the private sector or other college/university academic units such as public policy and business administration. If this leakage is significant, then it could be premature, if not unwarranted, to conclude that the small employment shares of blacks and Hispanics on economics faculties reflect historical and contemporary barriers—discrimination, for example. In this context, the small employment shares of blacks/Hispanics on economics faculties could reflect either their employment preferences for the private sector and other academic disciplines, and/or the relative success of the private sector and other academic disciplines
in recruiting economists from racial minority groups.