For the past year or so, the new hotness on the right has been an all-out attack on DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They object to it pretty much everywhere, but most of their attention recently has been focused on universities.
As usual, this got me curious. Unfortunately, it appears all but impossible to get reliable figures for the growth of DEI staff at universities. The best I could come up with was a Heritage Foundation study that tickled me because the authors chose to examine schools in the Power 5 football conferences.¹ Here it is:
I can't vouch for the accuracy of this, especially since it relied on web searches, but it probably gives a rough idea of things. It's just a snapshot, though, and doesn't show trends. Here's a trend chart for Ohio State University:
Put these two things together, stir in the fact that everyone thinks DEI administration has skyrocketed, and it's a pretty good guess that it really has skyrocketed—even more than overall university administration has.
Now, it's a little hard to figure out exactly why the right has such a big problem with this. It's not because they care deeply about university budgets, nor is it because this is related to curriculum. These are administrators whose job is mostly to recruit and retain minority students. They claim, of course, that it's just part of their dedication to a colorblind society, but that doesn't really hold water either. So as much as I hate to jump on the racism bandwagon here, it's hard to take this as anything other than general conservative opposition to anything that helps non-white people.
But how about on the left? I have a problem with DEI administration too. Here it is:
Over the past 20 years DEI programs have expanded considerably but they haven't really accomplished anything. The college enrollment rate of white and Asian students is down slightly while the the enrollment rate of Black and Hispanic students is dead flat.
Ditto for graduation rates. They're up for Black and Hispanic students, but no more than they are for everyone else. Universities have apparently gotten better at pushing kids over the finish line, but the Black and Hispanic gap hasn't closed more than a hair.²
So do DEI programs even work? Last night I wrote about the truism that "nothing works," and I suspect this is an example. It's all well intentioned, but what's the point if the end result isn't more students and graduates of color?
¹Soon to be the Power 4, of course.
²The authors of the Heritage report also claim that there's no correlation between a large DEI staff and student satisfaction with the campus DEI climate (among both white and nonwhite students).
I always assumed it was the same thing that Tom Wolfe identified in MauMauing the FlakCatchers.
" It took them no time at all to see that the poverty program's big projects, like manpower training, in which you would get some job counseling and some training so you would be able to apply for a job in the bank or on the assembly line--everybody with a brain in his head knew that this was the usual bureaucratic shuck. Eventually the government's own statistics bore out the truth of this conclusion. The ghetto youth who completed the manpower training didn't get any more jobs or earn any more money than the people who never took any such training at all. Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the "neighborhood organizer." As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month,,,,"
Yes. DEI is jobs for the boys.
If you have no jobs for graduates with degrees in African American Studies or Gender Studies pretty soon you have no students in those majors.
If schools really wanted to help minority students, they would focus on what those students need. Since those students are disproportionately poorer and less well prepared than white or Asian students they would put their resources into additional support for poorer students (i.e. programs to help them buy a suit for job interviews, etc.) and additional support (tutoring, summer classes, etc) for struggling students.
This seems like an inopportune occasion for Kevin to omit his (in)famous trendlines.
You say that DEI personnel are to "recruit and retain minority students" but those who hate DEI bureaucracy are clearly under the impression that the purpose of DEI staff is to enforce woke orthodoxy on campus by punishing students who openly disagree with the currently fashionable leftist viewpoints on privileged and disadvantaged groups.
I hate DEI precisely because it is to "recruit and retain minority students".
Generally exposing people to non-white folks in peer positions many for the first time makes people less racist.
"Generally exposing people to non-white folks in peer positions many for the first time makes people less racist."
Yes, THAT is the concept. The research in the workplace, unfortunately, is DEI programs have little, often negative, impact of the aforementioned goal.
I think there is a difference between hiring DEI administrators and having a university-wide DEI focus. I have worked at majority-minority institutions that are also aimed at working professionals. DEI is mostly about curriculum and resource choices, but the addition of the acronym just put words to what we'd always tried to do: provide an education that is relevant and reflective of student needs. It's pretty standard to try to discuss real world issues in courses, and to stock your library to meet users' interests. A university committed to DEI just makes sure that a wide variety of different student interests and needs are covered. You anticipate more, and don't just react when a hole in your program is pointed out. Hiring a diverse workforce just happens naturally in an institution like this - lots of candidates are drawn to it, and the diverse student body responds well to the people you hire (they don't view your Black professors or Deans as "affirmative action hires").
Judging the effectiveness of DEI is difficult, because you aren't running trials with controls. And Black, Hispanic, and Native students are more likely to have impediments outside of school that negatively affect learning, such as having less family wealth, not having a social network full of people with degrees, or having attended lower-quality K-12 institutions.
"Judging the effectiveness of DEI is difficult, because you aren't running trials with controls."
The control Kevin is using is comparing minority enrollment/graduation rates today with the rates 10-20 years ago, before DEI programs were really up and running. And, using that control, there is no sign that DEI has made any difference at all.
educationrealist (top comment above) understands with perfect clarity how DEI works on most campuses.
So someone in DEI is supposed to not just recruit and retain minority students but also make sure they succeed and excel in their academic pursuits, despite possibly having 12+ years of substandard previous education? Uh huh, that sounds like a reasonable expectation.
Also, Kevin, we do lots of things that make people feel good that have no measurable effect on anything. Like giving them Christmas off. Nobody has shown that productivity or anything else would falter without that day off, yet tens of millions of Americans have it off and tens of millions more are guaranteed time and a half or bonus pay for having to work it. (Yes I’m aware lots of red states don’t have such laws.) If DEI makes minority students feel better about themselves, I don’t see any harm in it, certainly no more or less than the (generally much larger) budgets given over to non-revenue sports programs that also help other students feel better about themselves.
I would say the cutoff dates in these charts make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of today's DEI initiatives, which really only came into being in a serious way in the wake of George Floyd's killing and the BLM protests in 2020. What was in place before was just sort of a hodge-podge of various opportunity and diversity programs. What has happened since 2020 is that these have been brought under more organized institutional umbrellas with (well-compensated) administrators, staff, etc. I think we'll know ca. 2030 whether any of these programs have had their intended effect in boosting minority student and faculty retention, improving educational outcomes, or (if such a thing can be measured with any meaning) increasing a sense of "belonging" in higher education.
Something has worked.
Looking across all professions, the number of women in all sorts of jobs which were exclusively male 60 years ago is astonishing, even if women are still underrepresented in many roles.
Sure, a CEO is still usually a white guy, or a man at least, as are his direct reports, but something happened since the Kennedy Administration, and as slow as the changes have been, there have been changes.
Gender may be the easiest category, though. Race, sexuality, transgender, and non-binary are harder classes to integrate.
And then there's seemingly the toughest one: avowed atheists. No one has ever entered federal elected office or
tue Supreme Court as an admitted atheist. Only Pete Stark has served as one, and he came out in his third term.
DEI is far more than just race. DEI is the natural outgrowth from the ADA. Without the ADA (and its explicit threat of lawsuits), it's unlikely DEI would have emerged.
Also, it makes more sense to weight DEI employment by student enrollment levels. Give us a ratio. Then, measure that ratio against each race -- if race is what you're measuring relative to DEI employment rates.
Yeah, this is more about making sure that events and activities reach out to more of the student and staff bodies.
What happened to all the years before 2004 and all the years after 2014?
I don’t see how you could draw any conclusions about DEI by looking at two graphs on enrollment and graduation rates. Is that even the point of DEI?
About “nothing works” in general. The usefulness of any practice can’t be measured in isolation. Each needs to be judged vis a vis the alternative, which is not measurable.
Let’s say I run every day. After 6 months, or 6 years, I have not lost a single pound. Is running “working”? It is hard to show any measurable positive result. But what if I didn’t run instead? Maybe I would have added 25 pounds and had my health deteriorate. In that scenario, running is a practice worth continuing even if it’s impossible to produce measurable benefits.
I don’t really understand how Kevin is arriving at the idea that the main function of DEI programs at universities is to enroll students, and secondly, to ensure that they graduate.
It strikes me that these programs are mainly about creating an atmosphere of genuine community where everyone in a campus can learn from each other, including how to navigate thorny issues as they occur.
Surely, there are aspects of enrollment and graduation that go into DEI. But it feels like those numbers alone serve as a rather blunt instrument.
Yeah, I think Kevin was just trying to use retention/graduation rates as a proxy for "feelings of acceptance and satisfaction" with the educational experience. I suppose over time, we'll start getting survey data about how students of color actually perceive DEI initiatives at their schools and what impact it had on their decision to stay/graduate or transfer/drop out. Maybe some of that data will be illuminating and educative, but it could also be, as Kevin suggests, really opaque and not tell us much.
Why should we be paying for hundreds of people to "creat[e] an atmosphere of genuine community where everyone in a campus can learn from each other, including how to navigate thorny issues as they occur" if that does not translate to increased enrollment and graduation of minority students?
So taking The Ohio State chart, the average total compensation for someone in the DEI field was $82,955. By 2023 it was $107,831. The BLS CPI calculator puts $82955 in 2018 at $102,762 today. So the field pays (on average) just ~5% higher today than it did five years ago. Better than a regression, but doesn't exactly seem like "plastics" ...
I have no idea if the DEI programs do any good or not, but it sure seems like they have a lot of employees. University of Michigan has 163. For comparison I chose what I'd assume would be a pretty big department to compare that to, and found the Computer Science department at Michigan has 156 faculty, not all of whom are full professors. So Michigan employees more people in DEI than it employs to teach computer science. Someone closer to the world of academia than I will have to decide if that's a good thing or not.
Well, the CS faculty are responsible for just that department. I assume the 163 DEI positions are spread across the entire university system, which oversees tens of thousands of students as well as thousands of faculty and staff.
jte21 but what exactly are those 163 people overseeing? And computer science is one of the top fields in the world these days and it seems like teaching that would be pretty much a core responsibility of a university. I'd be interested to know how the number of DEI folks compares to the number of financial aid, academic achievement, or career counseling employees. Again core missions of a university.
Looking at Duke, a smaller school and one I'd assume would be less likely on the DEI bandwagon: they have more DEI employees than tenure track professors in five of the school's nine colleges. Though their engineering college does have twice as many professors as DEI employees. Again, someone else will have to decide if this is good or bad. But it DOES seem like an awful lot of people to employ.
What? If the Heritage numbers are correct they have 57 DEI employees across the entire university.That's 57 out of over 20,000 employees (more than double that if you include their health care workers). How is that a heck of a LOT?
The faculty will have grad students to help teach classes (ca. 600, and I'd guess at least half are teaching assistants). I do see 96 teachers (faculty and some lecturers), and ca. 54 staff if I counted correctly:
https://cse.engin.umich.edu/about/by-the-numbers/
Yes, there will be grad students teaching classes along with adjuncts who are paid a pittance. Someone in a previous comment said a typical DEI salary is $107,000. That means Michigan is paying $17 million dollars a year for them. How much of that could/should be directed to hiring full time professors instead?
Careful. That figure is for Ohio. And includes benefits. Michigan could very well be different.
A lot of employees? The University of Michigan has over 7,000 academic staff, and close to 25,000 staff members in general. 163 focused on DEI is close to nothing for a university of that size. Their roles are primarily admin, not academic, so they don't teach anything, but dismissing them is like saying a university doesn't need admin or other types of support staff, and should just have academics that teach something. No university would function without those other jobs that help the academics teach and do research.
Yes, there are thousands of people who make a university function. I don’t doubt that janitorial and food service staff outnumber DEI.
But like I said above I’d like to know how the number of DEI folks compares to the number of financial aid, academic achievement, or career counseling employees. Those are the core missions of a university.
> it's hard to take this as anything other than general conservative opposition to anything that helps non-white people.
I think you are framing DEI incorrectly. The point is that a diverse group of smart people produce better results than a non-diverse group of smart people. You don't pursue diversity to help non-white people, that gets called out as racist by racists. You pursue diversity to improve the capitalist bottom line.
See _The Difference_ by Scott Page.
In terms of improving enrollment and graduation rates of minorities, that will be helped both by providing better Representation, and by the fact that more minorities in the hired mix improves the average income of minorities making college more affordable. And also, having more teachers around that a minority student can better relate to should improve the ability of the minority student to make their way to the finish line.
On the one hand, we're all learning. On the other hand, these are odd statements for any ostensibly well-informed person to make in 2024:
"Now, it's a little hard to figure out exactly why the right has such a big problem with this."
It's not just the right that has a problem with DEI, nor is it in any way shape or form difficult to figure out why conservatives, moderates, liberals, republicans, and many democrats have a problem with DEI. There are thousands of articles on the topic. It could not possibly be easier to answer that question.
"It's not because they care deeply about university budgets, nor is it because this is related to curriculum. These are administrators whose job is mostly to recruit and retain minority students."
How and why does Kevin come to the conclusion that DEI is "mostly" for recruiting and retaining minority students? He doesn't say. That assertion is a topic for debate; it most certainly is not the self-evident truism that Kevin presents it as.
"They claim, of course, that it's just part of their dedication to a colorblind society, but that doesn't really hold water either. So as much as I hate to jump on the racism bandwagon here, it's hard to take this as anything other than general conservative opposition to anything that helps non-white people."
It's unfortunate to read something so inaccurate from such an otherwise well-informed individual.
So, here's the non-partisan organization FIRE (a group that cannot accurately or fully be described as conservative) on the topic:
"Over the past few years, FIRE has heard from countless faculty members concerned that their university’s DEI statement policy violates the First Amendment, academic freedom principles, or both.
"Of course, institutions of higher education have both the authority and obligation to prevent unlawful discrimination on campus, as well as an interest in employing faculty who work toward the academic success of students of various backgrounds and identities. But DEI policies frequently go further, compelling faculty to affirm contested views on matters of public debate or to embed specific ideological perspectives in their academic activities. This violates faculty members’ individual rights and thwarts values like intellectual freedom, epistemic humility, and open-mindedness that underlie a university’s mission to produce and disseminate knowledge."
That statement took me less than one minute to find on google. And there are countless similar observations out there.
Here's one from a liberal columnist at The Atlantic:
"I’ve never seen a policy that threatens academic freedom or First Amendment rights on a greater scale than what is now unfolding in this country’s largest system of higher education: California’s community colleges.
"Roughly 1.9 million students are enrolled in that system ... But frustratingly––even tragically––the same system is implementing new DEI rules, mandated by state bureaucrats, that trample on free speech while coercing faculty members on how to teach their subjects, which scholarly conclusions to reach, and even what political positions to advocate. Some faculty members say they feel like they must choose between their job and their conscience."
That one took another 30 seconds to find.
So why would Kevin make his oddly uninformed statements in the apparent absence of even the briefest or most cursory glance at the abundance of information and commentary on the topic in question?
I don't know if it's due to partisanship, tribalism (an issue that Kevin recently and to his credit acknowledged), or some other form epistemic closure (life inside a tightly enclosed information bubble that reinforces all of our preconceived ideas), but Kevin sadly remains remarkably resistant to acknowledging reality when it comes to certain topics.
"non-partisan organization FIRE"
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Your ridiculous obsession with DEI and especially the California Community College system is hilarious.
"a liberal columnist at The Atlantic...Conor Friedersdorf"
Stop, you're killing me.
@ColBatGuano:
Your response is not in any way substantive or constructive.
From his wikipedia page: "In an interview with journalist Matt Lewis, Friedersdorf stated that he has right-leaning views but that he does not consider himself to be a doctrinal conservative or a member of the conservative movement.[7] Writing for The Atlantic, Friedersdorf laid out his argument for why he refused to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 and was supporting Gary Johnson in his bid for president as the Libertarian Party candidate."
So he describes himself as "right-leaning" and that makes him "liberal" in your view?
You're neither substantive nor constructive, so FOAD troll. You're a terrible person.
FIRE is very much a conservative organization that is primarily funded by hard right donors and organizations, and Conor Friesdorf is not a liberal, he is a right winger libertarian.
When even basic facts are fudged to give a false appearance of non-bias, it becomes kind of moot trying to argue anything. It also doesn't help that you are a known troll obsessed with racial matters and who thinks whites are the true victims of racial discrimination.
But it is in no way inaccurate.
Long post to lie about your sources.
What comes under the rubric of DEI? Is the growth seen new hires, or just the incorporation of different initiatives into the DEI fold?
1) Heritage agitprop
+
2) Chart from conservative news site that also keeps a 'cancel culture database'
+
3) Grad rates through 2014
=
lol
"Soon to be the Power 4, of course."
HA! It's already a power 4 and soon to be a power 3, after the CFP invitational committee's unprecedented snub of my beloved Florida State Seminoles. If an undefeated ACC champ can't get in to the invitational in the top 4 spots (when only 2 other teams were undefeated) then the ACC is already not considered a "power" conference.
"Gee, when are you Seminoles going to get over that?" you might ask. Answer: a) It's only been a month, and b) NEVER!
"But you guys got manhandled by Georgia so obviously you didn't belong." Answer (with steam shooting out of my ears). That was NOT the same team. Something like 30 players (13 who had started the Florida game) did not play. The team that faced Georgia was essentially a scout team and a dispirited scout team who had been told that from the beginning, there was nothing they could have done to get an invitation to the "playoff" so it was all a big lie. Oh, and our 3rd string freshman QB who had spent have the season injured put up more yards in that loss than Jalen Milroe of the great Alabama was able to put up throwing to his first string receivers against Michigan.
OK sorry rant over.
The FSU snub was an epic injustice. The PAC 2 shrinkage is another sign of the utter corruption of college football. NCAA heads ought to roll.
I don't have a personal issue with the concept of DEI. I do wish we had better measurable results and some degree of cost management. However, I do have issues around higher ed and
1. tremendous rise in tuition since about the mid 1970s...up maybe 700% !!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14vxwgl/oc_cost_of_college_tuition_has_risen_710_since/
2. the significant increase in administrative overhead.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/11/yale-now-has-more-administrators-than-undergrads-thanks-to-a-mammoth-bureaucracy/
3. While the data is not clear, some studies find DEI has no, or negative, effect in the workplace
https://www.reworked.co/employee-experience/most-dei-training-doesnt-work-heres-how-to-tie-training-to-impact/#:~:text=Researchers%20have%20studied%20the%20effects,causing%20backlash%20and%20activating%20biases.
Notably, your rise in administrative cost is before DEI,
Also, your last one doesn't say what you say it said...
Sweet titty-fucking Christ, Kevin!, it's Heritage! I stopped reading right there. That outfit has long since lost the right to the good faith attention of my eyeballs. Same for CATO, et. al., all those moribund so-called 'think tanks' from late last century. No one should regard them as other than propaganda mills targeted at the Reader's Digest set.
Let's break this down:
1. DEI duration. Kevin says "Over the past 20 years DEI programs have expanded considerably..." but taking U Michigan DEI (top of the Heritage chart) as my example, they identify their DEI efforts as beginning in 2015 (9 years ago). Conflating all efforts to diversify on campus with DEI-specific approaches seems suspect methodologically. Nor is it clear how long a DEI program needs to function to achieve its objectives. If the goal were "end racism" then such programs might take decades; if the goal were "diversify faculty" then it could easily take 20-30 years for reasons I address at 3 below. Nor is it clear how much spending is necessary for DEI programs to work: implement any program without dedicating any resources and that program will fail regardless of how sound it might be. Is Ohio State's $21 million enough? For that matter, how is spending being measured? If U Michigan hired 120 new DEI administrators over the past few years, that's radically different from U Michigan appointing existing faculty and administrators to DEI positions. If Professor Z in Chemistry gets a "DEI coordinator" title and new duties to take 10% of work-time, but no additional money, does Z's salary get counted as DEI spending? I'd want to know about spending on programs and initiatives, not salaries.
2. DEI targeting. Kevin suggests DEI is about racial diversity in admissions. That's not wrong but it is massively incomplete. U Michigan DEI calls for "accessibility," "anti-racism," "belonging," and "justice." I don't know how to measure the last two at all. But "accessibility" means students/faculty/staff with disabilities, a full quarter of their DEI objective and completely ignored in this analysis. Nor does looking at racial enrollment track faculty and staff diversity within the narrower category of race. In addition to race and disability, DEI also calls out gender/gender expression, age, language and culture, political perspective, and religion. My own sense is that colleges and universities (driven in part by ADA, Title IX, and the like) have done much better with accommodating disability and with gender than with race thus far, though I'm unsure how to track that. Admissions of foreign nationals, especially into graduate programs, might be another metric to look at.
3. Does DEI mean growing the pool, or changing your school's share? There's no national DEI effort: each university is concerned with its own numbers. That means U Michigan can achieve racial DEI goals not by increasing the number of Black students going to college, but by increasing the number of Black students who apply and are accepted at U Michigan. Based on my conversations with college admissions people, it takes years of sustained effort to get even a small number of high schoolers who didn't plan to attend college to put together applications. It's much easier to compete for those Black students already applying to college. If U Michigan doubles the number of Black students in its newest undergraduate class, without increasing the total number of Black students going to college, then aggregate enrollment rates don't change at all but Michigan DEI can say it's been wildly successful.
The effect is even more extreme with faculty recruitment (a major aspect of DEI efforts--you get more women physicists if they can take classes and be advised by women physicists). It's 8-12 years of postsecondary education to train most college faculty. If we arbitrarily decide DEI started in 2015 and assume it was instantly effective, we would expect to see an increase in the diversity of the faculty job pool starting in 2023. If we again just focus on race, you'd need to look to see if there's been a recent change in the distribution of white to non-white PhDs (not raw numbers, as there's fewer faculty jobs period and thus you'd expect production to drop). As with students, DEI translates into increased competition for diverse applicants in the pool. Maybe you could try to catch that by looking at initial salaries by race for faculty, on the principle that salaries are higher if competition for candidates has increased. But what this really means is the schools able to spend money or with high prestige scoop up most of the diverse candidates leaving other institutions unable to improve. Meaningfully changing the diversity of the hiring pool could easily take decades.
4. CYA. A university might spend hundreds of millions toward a genuine DEI effort. But another university might spend millions or tens of millions to "prove" that it isn't racist or discriminatory or to compete with those other universities, without actually being concerned with concrete results. Conflating these two kinds of programs to see if DEI works is going to muddle your data. Maybe it would be easier to pick a few schools that are clearly dedicated to DEI and compare them with institutions with NO DEI programs (Bob Jones University?), and then look at change over time in that specific institution's diversity in hires, enrollment, graduation rates, and whatever data you can find on "campus climate." That's obviously harder if all "credible" institutions of higher learning have DEI programs in place, unless you can somehow tell the difference between ones with solid institutional buy-in and ones meant to look good but change nothing.
"Now, it's a little hard to figure out exactly why the right has such a big problem with this."
I've always had a problem with these types of initiatives because it's ridiculous to unnaturally lift and benefit certain groups based on race. Diversity is just not a goal that, to me, warrants these types of expenditures or making an uneven playing filed for applicants. Now that I have tow kids that will be starting the college application process in the coming years, it's pretty infuriating that they're starting off with a disadvantage because they are white.
Long the rallying cries of a certain kind of guy.....
A lack of discrimination is ACSHUALLY discrimination!
A lack of an advantage is ACSHUALLY an unfair disadvantage!
Anything that doesnt benefit me at the expense of others is unfair!
Wheeeee, 'Murica!
Graduation rates are a good target, but that would be more the students' ability to pay for college, not how included races were in the staff and student leadership.
Does Kevin Drum actually ever read any of these comments or are they purely to boost "engagement" numbers for some reason?