Racial Representation among Academics and Students’ Academic and Labor Market Outcomes

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 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 representation benefits the academic outcomes of minority groups: When minority students are exposed to 1 SD higher proportion of minority academics, they are 1.03ppt more likely to graduate with a first or upper second class honors degree and they are also 0.88ppt 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.