Too often, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices operate in crisis mode, failing to make persuasive cases for why they’re needed until lawmakers are threatening to legislate them out of existence or administrators are pulling out the budget ax, experts say.
Elizabeth Halimah is among those who are trying to change that. “I believe in being strategic and forward thinking,” she says, anticipating what changes are afoot in the DEI world and preparing data to explain and defend the work. Halimah is an independent consultant who recently retired as an associate vice provost overseeing equity matters for the University of California’s president’s office. She uses data “to help tell the story — the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
She and several other advocates are encouraging offices to start collecting data to better assess what strategies are and aren’t working.
A major challenge for college diversity offices is marshaling statistics to make the case that programs are working and worth investing in. Misconceptions about the field abound, and without persuasive data, these offices and personnel are vulnerable to cuts.
“A lot of the current climate is based on a series of assumptions about what it means and what it leads to, but it’s not rooted in a lot of facts or figures or data,” says Kevin Swartout, a former professor of psychology at Georgia State University who leads Rankin Climate, a group that performs climate assessments and data reports for colleges.
Critics, who’ve succeeded in quashing college DEI efforts in at least 14 states, contend that the programs give an unfair advantage to minority students, violate free speech, and are a waste of taxpayer money.
Supporters counter that they’re needed to overcome the effects of decades of exclusionary practices that have put people from certain demographic groups at a disadvantage as they pursue higher education.
Start with the data. End with the stories.
Personal anecdotes and compelling stories are effective ways to illustrate the success of their programs and personnel, DEI officials say. But grounding these stories in metrics that are straightforward, easy to understand, and based on solid methodology is essential, they add.
“Start with the data,” Halimah says. “End with the stories.” She cites Tufts University’s diversity dashboard as an effective model.
During a recent webinar attended by about 450 people and offered by the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, experts shared advice on how to do that.
Collecting data to track progress and highlight areas needing improvement takes time and resources that are in short supply in many college diversity offices that are struggling to stave off cuts. If the college has an office of institutional research, it’s probably already collecting much of the needed data. If asked, researchers may be willing to create a few custom reports, Halimah advises.
If there’s no central data office, she says, you might need to go from office to office gathering numbers from undergraduate and graduate admissions offices, personnel officials, and undergraduate and graduate deans. Expand your network to include data wonks, she adds. “Build a relationship. IR folks have become my friends.”
But don’t overlook the state and national data that’s readily available — like the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds. To put campus-based numbers in context, researchers should compare them, say, to the pool of high-school graduates in the region, or to workers in the labor pool. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks both college enrollment and employment numbers, can be a helpful resource.
But not everything is so easily quantified. “Some DEI ‘efforts’ are institutional policies, such as antidiscrimination policies or gender-recognition policies, where it’s difficult to quantify cause and effect,” Halimah wrote in an email.
The best way to demonstrate the collective impact, she says, is to divide efforts into three categories. The first category, representation, includes the number of people from specific demographic groups and how that compares with a control group like the overall population or workforce.
The second category to track is how equitable, or inequitable outcomes are. How many students are sticking around after the first year and graduating within six? How many staff members are being promoted and faculty members tenured?
The third category, Halimah says, is inclusion, or a sense of belonging. That’s best captured through climate surveys and focus groups. Swartout agrees that the quantitative analysis doesn’t tell the whole story. “It doesn’t tell you what it feels like to be excluded because of your identity,” he says.
But even for a survey, getting buy-in can be difficult, especially in states where diversity efforts are under attack or being shut down completely. “When a climate assessment is focused on DEI, some people assume there’s an agenda that underlays the data collection,” says Swartout. “There’s an assumption that it’s tilted toward a certain demographic.”
When a climate assessment is focused on DEI, some people assume there’s an agenda that underlays the data collection.
Rather than asking a question that relates, for instance, to the experiences of Black students or female faculty members, he suggests asking a broad question that anyone can answer, like “overall, how comfortable are you with the climate at X University?”
Along with that question, he also gathers demographic information about the respondents so that their answers can be disaggregated by race, gender, sexuality, or other identities. The results are sometimes surprising. “White male students are feeling in some cases just as marginalized as students of color and Indigenous students,” Swartout says. “Two groups are both feeling disenfranchised, feeling like the system is stacked against me.”
The resulting analysis has to be based on the latest methodology and research methods that can withstand the scrutiny of faculty members well versed in statistics, he adds.
Gathering and presenting DEI data can be daunting; a refresher statistics course can clear up confusion over ratios, rates, and proportions, the speakers note. But don’t assume, Swartout says, that it’s not worth the effort because you’re “not a data person.”
“You don’t necessarily have to know how to calculate a regression analysis by hand, but give it a try. Don’t sell yourself short,” he says.
Monroe France is vice provost for institutional inclusive excellence at Tufts. “It’s critical at this time when DEI efforts nationally are coming under critique and criticism that our work is rooted in data so our practices are well informed,” he says. “When our critics say ‘how do we know it works?’ we have evidence to point to.”
Sometimes, the tables and graphs show where current diversity efforts need ramping up. When colleges began evaluating recently how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban race-based admissions practices was affecting their enrollments, Tufts’ dashboard gave it a head start.
Preliminary enrollment figures at the selective private institution revealed that the percentage of Black first-year students had dropped this fall from 7.3 percent to 4.7 percent. Complicating matters, there was also an increase in the number of students who opted not to divulge their race.
A single color-coded page on Tufts’ dashboard makes it easy to track racial and gender diversity, by school and by year, among students, faculty, staff, trustees, and members of schools’ boards of advisers. France says that admissions officers across the university will be able to share legally permissible strategies for improving outreach to students of color.
“For our survival going forward, it’s absolutely essential that we lean in to evidence-based data” as well as diversity and equity-related scholarship being conducted across the campus, France says. “It gives us armor to defend our work.”
For our survival going forward, it’s absolutely essential that we lean in to evidence-based data.
Compelling data led California to increase funding for DEI programs. Halimah looks for allies in offices that share certain goals and have a common incentive to see more students succeeding. That wasn’t hard to do in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, set out a goal that by 2030, 70 percent of working-age adults would have a postsecondary award or bachelor’s degree and that equity gaps would be plugged. Both would require increasing both college enrollments and graduation rates across demographics.
The University of California offers an array of programs, services, and supports aimed at better preparing students from underrepresented groups for college. By carefully tracking the progress that participating students from high schools and community colleges have made and reporting it to regents and lawmakers, the university has received steady funding, even in years of budget shortfalls, Halimah says. The amount funded for those programs nearly doubled in 2022-23 to $47 million.
Data that demonstrate where efforts are falling short are also valuable. One chart on the university’s diversity dashboard shows the proportion of Black and Hispanic students shrinking steadily along the education pipeline, from ninth grade to high-school graduation to university enrollment and first-year retention.
St. Olaf College, a private institution of about 3,000 students, spells out its goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion on an interactive dashboard that tracks progress on each of these three aspirations. The equity analysis, which displays the participation of students of color in activities known to improve success rates, suggests some strategies for improvement. Those rates were slipping in recent years for mentored research and learning communities, while increasing for study abroad.
Given the perception that colleges have bloated DEI bureaucracies that are draining money from other priorities, colleges would do well to gather data before being asked.
Five months before signing a sweeping law banning DEI activities in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, demanded that public colleges account for their diversity spending. They did, and for four-year universities, it added up to 1 percent or less of their budgets. In another state whose governor hadn’t already signaled his fierce opposition to DEI, that might have seemed like a drop in the fiscal bucket hardly worth eliminating.
