As more Latinos enroll in college, the number of Latinos going into the professoriate is not keeping pace, according to a recent Excelencia in Education analysis of federal data. In 2013, Latinos made up 17 percent of all students in higher education, up from 11 percent in 2003.
Yet the percent of tenured or tenure track Latino faculty is not growing as quickly, meaning that there is a growing deficit in the Latino student-to-faculty ratio. Between 2003 and 2014, the percentage of Latinos among all faculty members grew from 2 to 4 percent, moving the ratio of Latino students to Latino faculty from 80:1 to 90:1 over the same period, according to the Excelencia report, published at the organization’s annual Accelerating Latino Student Success (ALASS) workshop in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
“There hasn’t been much change in the overall representation of Latino faculty, but when we look at the ratio of student to faculty, we’ve seen that the situation has gotten worse,” Deborah Santiago, Excelencia chief operating officer and vice president for policy, told Diverse.
Nor does it seem likely that there will be greater Latino representation any time soon, because the Latino pipeline to the professoriate is not particularly strong. Latinos make up only 8 percent of graduate students and 5 percent of graduate assistants, according to Excelencia’s report.
Yet the problem of diversifying the professoriate is becoming ever more urgent, Armando Bengochea said at an ALASS panel on future directions for Latino faculty on Thursday, particularly in light of the ongoing adjunctification of the professoriate.
“Higher education has mostly been talking about and lamenting the problem for decades, rather than actually doing something with their resources,” Bengochea said.
Tenured professor jobs are even harder to come by, Bengochea said, and Latino students need more institutional and foundational support to persist, particularly in humanities disciplines. Bengochea is a program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a private foundation known for its grant-making initiatives in higher education and the humanities, among other areas.
