Racial representation among academics and students’ academic and labor market outcomes

Angus Holford and Sonkurt Sen

Labour Economics, 2025, vol. 96, issue C

Abstract: We study the impact of racial representation among academic staff on university students’ academic and labor market outcomes. We use administrative data on the universe of staff and students at all UK universities, linked to survey data on students’ post-graduation outcomes, exploiting idiosyncratic variation (conditional on a rich set of fixed effects and observable student, staff, and university-department level characteristics) in the proportion of racial minority academic staff to whom students are exposed. We find that minority and own-race representation benefits the academic outcomes of minority groups: When minority students are exposed to 1 standard deviation higher proportion of minority academics, they are 1.03ppt (2% of the mean) more likely to graduate with a first or upper second class honors degree and they are also 0.88ppt (1.5% of the mean) more likely to graduate on time. There is no beneficial impact of minority or own-race representation on the labor market outcomes of minorities. However, we do find that minority representation among academic staff significantly increases progression of minority students to graduate study, suggesting that there may be benefits of same-race representation operating through provision of role models or domain-specific advice and guidance.

Keywords: Minorities; Representation; Returns to education; Labor market outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I26 J15 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:96:y:2025:i:c:s0927537125000697

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2025.102745

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