New Report on the Representation of Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities in the Workforce of Minority-Serving Institutions

Minority-serving institutions (MSIs) play an important role in ensuring students from underrepresented races and ethnicities receive a quality education.

While there is an abundance of research on students who attend MSIs, little research has examined the MSI workforce, specifically, how the racial/ethnic representation of faculty, administrator, professional and staff reflects the student populations being served.

The latest CUPA-HR report, The Representation of Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities in the Workforce of Minority-Serving Higher Education Institutions targets this gap by providing an overview of MSI representation among all U.S. higher ed institutions and showing their geographic spread across the country; providing a closer examination of racial/ethnic and gender composition of faculty, administrators, professionals and non-exempt staff; and assessing how well the racial/ethnic composition of the higher ed workforce at MSIs reflects their student populations and matches the minority-serving mission of the institutions.

Key findings from the report:

• MSIs have higher racial/ethnic minority representation among their workforce than non-MSIs.
• HBCUs have the highest representation of racial/ethnic minority employees.
• Overall, the representation of racial/ethnic minority faculty at MSIs does not match the representation in students.
• Overall, administrators, professionals, and staff at MSIs have similar racial/ethnic minority representation when compared to students.

For more findings on the representation of women and racial/ethnic minorities in the workforce at MSIs, read the full report.