Tag Archives | Faculty Hiring

Crisis and Uncertainty: Did the Great Recession Reduce the Diversity of New Faculty?

Kwan Woo Kim, Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, Gal Deutsch

Sociological Science October 14, 2021
10.15195/v8.a15


The demographic composition of the U.S. professoriate affects student composition and, thus, the pipeline for professional and managerial jobs. Amid concern about the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the labor market, much remains unknown about how economic downturns affect faculty hiring and the demographic makeup of hires. We examine the effects of the Great Recession on faculty hiring. That crisis walloped the U.S. academic labor market. Tenure-track hires in four-year colleges and universities declined by 25 percent between 2007 and 2009, recovering slowly through 2015. Hires of black, Hispanic, and Asian American faculty declined disproportionately. Public institutions and research-oriented institutions, which faced the greatest resource challenges and uncertainty about the future, made the biggest cuts in the hiring of people of color. Our findings suggest that financial uncertainty led to a reversal in progress on faculty diversity. Faculty and administrators making hiring decisions in the years following the COVID-19 crisis should be aware of this pattern.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kwan Woo Kim: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: kwanwookim@fas.harvard.edu

Alexandra Kalev: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
E-mail: akalev@tauex.tau.ac.il

Frank Dobbin: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: frank_dobbin@harvard.edu

Gal Deutsch: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
E-mail: galdeutsch@mail.tau.ac.il

Acknowledgments: We thank the National Science Foundation (DGE-1444586) and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2013-10-26, G-2019-12369) for funding. Direct correspondence to KwanWoo Kim, Department of Sociology, Harvard University: kwanwookim@fas.harvard.edu.

  • Citation: Kim, Kwan Woo, Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Gal Deutsch. 2021. “Crisis and Uncertainty: Did the Great Recession Reduce the Diversity of New Faculty?” Sociological Science 8: 308-324.
  • Received: June 11, 2021
  • Accepted: July 3, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a15


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