The fallacy of “there are no candidates”: Institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino doctorate earners

Background: Despite many initiatives to improve graduate student and faculty diversity in engineering, there has been little or no change in the percentage of people from racially minoritized backgrounds in either of these groups. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this paper is to counter the scarcity fallacy, in which institutions blame the “shortage” of qualified people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds for their own lack of representation, related to prospective PhD students and prospective faculty from traditionally marginalized groups. This study identifies the BS-to-PhD and PhD-to-tenure-track-faculty institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino engineering doctorate recipients. Design/Method: Using the US Survey of Earned Doctorates, we tracked the BS-to-PhD institutional pathways of 3952 Black/African American and 5732 Hispanic/Latino engineering PhD graduates. We also used the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to track the PhD-to-tenure-track faculty pathways of 104 Black/African American and 211 Hispanic/Latino faculty. Results: The majority of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino PhD graduates in this study did not earn their BS degrees from Top 25 institutions, but rather from Not Top 25, non-US, and minority-serving institutions. The results also show the relatively small proportion of PhD earners and faculty members who move into highly ranked institutions after earning a bachelor's degree from outside this set of institutions. Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for graduate student and faculty recruitment by illustrating that recruitment from a narrow range of institutions (i.e., Top 25 institutions) is unlikely to result in increased diversity among racially minoritized PhDs and faculty in engineering.