Friday, April 23, 2021

The Leaky Pipeline into Academic Philosophy for Black Students in the U.S.

Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, Eric Winsberg and I have a paper forthcoming in The Philosophers' Magazine on the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of philosophy students and professors, and how it has changed since the year 2000.  We look at data from first-year intention to major through entry into the professoriate, drawing on several large data sources.

Below is a teaser, with graphs on the percent of philosophy majors who are non-Hispanic Black at three educational levels: first-year intention to major, completed bachelor's degree, and completed PhD, from 2000-2001 through the most recent available year.  In each figure, the heavy black line represents the percent of philosophy majors who identify as non-Hispanic Black and the gray line represents the percentage of non-Hispanic Black students in all other majors combined.  If the figures don't display correctly, click to enlarge and clarify.


In this first figure (drawing on the HERI CRIP database), note the sharp increase in first-year intention to major from 2000 to 2016.  By the end of the period, first-year students intending to major in philosophy are about 10% non-Hispanic Black, similar to their overall representation in the undergraduate population.

How about bachelor's degrees awarded?


Here (drawing on the NCES IPEDS database), things are quite different.  It does appear that the percent of philosophy bachelor's recipients identifying as non-Hispanic Black is rising -- from about 4% in the early 2000s to about 6% more recently.  But it still remains far below the 10% non-Hispanic black among bachelor's recipients overall.  This might partly reflect a lag in the data.  Students entering in 2015 or 2016 (the final two years of the first figure) wouldn't normally be receiving their bachelor's degrees by 2019 (the final year of the second figure).  Other possible explanations include a tendency for Black students disproportionately to exit (or not enter) philosophy, difference in the questionnaire items or methods, or sampling problems in the HERI database.

We see further falloff at the PhD level (drawing on the NSF SED database):


Non-Hispanic Black students are currently receiving only 1-4% of PhDs, with a weakly increasing trend at best.  Temporal offset might again play a partial role, but it can't be the whole story.  Even if we take bachelor's recipients from 2010 and 2011 as the approximate cohort to receive PhDs in 2018 and 2019, there's a falloff from about 5% to about 3%.  It's unlikely that sampling problems could explain the difference, since both datasets capture the large majority of degree recipients.

The most natural explanation is a "leaky pipeline".  Philosophy is increasingly drawing Black students' initial interest.  However, for whatever reason, as their education proceeds from first-year to bachelor's to PhD, Black students are disproportionately likely to exit.

6 comments:

  1. This is interesting work! Thank you.

    Here is another hypothesis. Philosophy PhD programs are full of the children and grandchildren of PhDs and faculty. Currently philosophy faculty are overwhelming white (https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/data_on_profession/fy2020-demographicstatistics.pdf), so the overrepresentation of children/grandchildren of faculty also perpetuates racial underrepresentation.

    This "feedback loop" hypothesis might be true alongside a separate "leaky pipeline." But maybe we should not theorize only about a "leaky pipeline," which emphasizes that certain people exit the field. Part of the explanation may be a "well-oiled pipeline": being awarded a PhD program or faculty position is very competitive, and it's easier to succeed from certain backgrounds, and with certain connections.

    See also: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6wjxc

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  2. Thanks for that comment, anon! Yes, that could definitely be part of the story. Lots correlates with race, and without a lot more data it's hard to know what proportion of different factors are influencing the outcomes.

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  3. Looking forward to reading the full paper when it's out.

    Any way to look at family income along with the other variables? I wonder if students who are less financially secure end up shying away from programs perceived to be have a worse "ROI." Philosophy gets a bad (and unfair) rap in that regard.

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  4. Yes, some of these data sources have income based measures, though that typically requires a custom request if you want detailed info on income by majoring specifically in philosophy. Here are some of my findings about that:
    https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2017/10/do-philosophy-professors-tend-to-come.html

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  5. Relating Culture vs Nature...
    ...Could we treat history's statistics as "bodies at rest or forces in equilibrium" changing into unknown equilibriums in the "presence and absence" of (our) being....

    Is deconstructionism today...analytics without an origin model...

    Its never been "out of Africa...Its been "Africa into the world"...

    Thanks, for this time, many great reads...

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  6. Thanks, Eric--I see from reading the post to which you linked that you had a similar question yourself (about income). I have other questions but I'll just wait for the article to come out. Thanks to you and your coauthors for writing it.

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