Retention and recruitment of minority students and faculty in public affairs and administration programs

ABSTRACT

The need to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts has reached monumental heights in the past decade as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and other DEIA efforts. This shift in thought has impacted recruitment and hiring practices in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. For years, universities have tried a variety of mechanisms to increase the pool of minority applicants in PhD programs as well as the faculty ranks. However, many of these efforts have not been sustainable. In this article, we discuss the results from a survey of graduate-level public affairs programs to discern specific efforts to increase the number of minority students pursuing graduate degrees and subsequently the number of minority faculty. In addition, we completed an extant review of the literature to determine additional practices that have proven fruitful in other graduate programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Minority faculty
• minority students
• recruitment
• retention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While not included in a table, 94% of the programs indicated that they have at least one minority student matriculating in their graduate program.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles Menifield

Charles Menifield, Ph.D. is Dean Emeritus and Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University Newark where he teaches courses in public budgeting and financial management. His current research focuses on the use of lethal force in policing.

Vernise Estorcien

Vernise Estorcien, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU Indianapolis. She is a scholar of public policy and administration, police youth engagement, and racial equity.

Jean-Claude Ndongo

Jean-Claude Ndongo is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). His areas of research are public budgeting and finance, public procurement, and disaster and emergency management. He serves as the treasurer for FAU’s Association of Doctoral Students at the School of Public Administration (ADSPA) and the chair of the fundraising committee of the Section on African Public Administration (SAPA) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA).

Merlene-Patrice Quispe

Merlene-Patrice Quispe, Ph.D. is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leadership and Management area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her research interests include examining truth and integrity in budgets, especially as the state, county, and municipal levels; examining the performance of local governments in exécution of their budgets; and furthering the research in performance budgeting by examining if adherence to best practices as recommended by budgetary institutions does, in fact, lead to improved fiscal outcomes.

Bruce D. McDonald

Bruce D. McDonald III, Ph.D. is a professor of public budgeting and finance at North Carolina State University. He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Public Administration, co-editor-in-chief of both Public Finance Journal and Journal of Public Affairs Education. He also serves as the editor of Routledge’s Public Budgeting and Finance Book Series and co-editor of Routledge’s Public Affairs Education Book Series. He also sits on several boards of nonprofit organizations, including the North Carolina Public Administration Alliance.