External Labor Markets and the Distribution of Black Scientists and Engineers in Academia

Abstract

With each step in an academic career, from high-school graduation to promotion to full professor, there are progressive decreases in the representation of African Americans (National Science Foundation [NSF], 1988a, 1999). In the mid-1990s African Americans comprised 12% of the total population, 11% of the labor force, and 10% of those enrolled full-time in undergraduate programs, but they held less than 5% of the full-time faculty positions in four-year colleges and universities (U.S. Department of Education, 1997). Although black students are earning an ever expanding share of baccalaureate degrees granted in the United States, most fields show only minuscule improvements in their sparse representation among graduate degree recipients (Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992). In the sciences and engineering, black scholars comprised only 2.4% of the faculty in four-year institutions in 1995, just under 2% of those with tenure, and only 1.3% of the full professors (NSF, 1999). Because of the crucial role that black facul ty play in the recruitment and retention of black students, their severe underrepresentation among faculty has widespread implications at most postsecondary institutions (Blackwell, 1987, 1988). Factors at all stages of the educational pipeline have been blamed for the small and, in some fields, shrinking black doctoral labor supply and the relative scarcity of black faculty. Possible barriers include the public schools' failure to address the needs of minority children, inhospitable college campuses, a post-Baake retreat from recruiting black students for graduate programs, some states' recent abandonment of affirmative action in college and graduate admissions, and reductions in financial aid as the costs of graduate education escalate (Blackwell, 1988; Brazziel, 1988; Corner & Haynes, 1991). These barriers at early stages in the educational pipeline have also been linked to the subsequent underrepresentation of black faculty (Epps, 1989; Menges & Exum, 1983; Moore, 1988). But the very scarcity of black faculty has complicated efforts to collect representative data that would clarify how the academic labor market operates for black scholars. Until recently, many empirical studies of the impact of race on faculty careers have been limited to anecdotal evidence (e.g., Sutherland, 1990), or single disciplines (e.g., Kulis, 1992). As nationally representative studies have begun to appear, they increasingly disaggregate the data to contrast the status of black faculty across scholarly fields and institutional types (Astin, Antonio, Cress, & Astin, 1997; Russell & Fairweather, 1991; U.S. Department of Education, 1997). Detailed institutional and disciplinary breakdowns appear to be crucial in understanding black college faculty, because they are employed disproportionately in historically black institutions and two-year colleges and are concentrated in a few scholarly fields. This article examines how black faculty careers are shaped by an interplay of disciplinary and labor supply forces at work within academic science and engineering. Specifically, we investigate whether, and how, the external labor market in academia affects the locations where black college faculty find employment in the sciences and engineering. After reviewing conceptual frameworks that describe stratification processes in academic labor markets, we consider evidence of important factors that influence where black academics secure work. By identifying factors that facilitate or impede the hiring and retention of black faculty, we hope to enhance our understanding of the status of racial equity in academia and inform debates about how to increase racial diversity in higher education. Theoretical Perspectives on Academic Labor Markets Academic labor markets have been conceptualized as governed by three broad sets of factors (Breneman & Youn, 1988; Fairweather, 1995; Hansen, 1986; Winston, 1994). …