Leadership in Education

About the report:

Raising the education level of the overall U.S. population requires closing the educational gaps among racial/ethnic groups and by gender. Although the members of the younger generation of some racial/ethnic groups are more likely to attain college degrees than their predecessors, that is not the case across all groups. Other findings include: the high school completion rate for young people has not improved much, and college enrollment gaps have widened among racial/ethnic groups during the past two decades.

The Minorities in Higher Education series, which began in 1984, is designed to help gauge the progress in our quest for educational excellence and equity for all races/ethnicities and for both men and women in American higher education. The full status report is produced biennially in even-numbered years, while updates on selected information are provided as a supplement in the intervening years.

Note: access to article requires a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

From the article:

William B. Harvey was the first person ever appointed to the position of vice president for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia, a job he held from 2005 to 2009. A recognized expert on diversity issues in higher education, Mr. Harvey is also founding president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

With more than three decades of higher-education experience, he recently joined North Carolina A&T University, where he serves as dean of the School of Education. In a conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Harvey spoke about the barriers that still remain, what a chief diversity officer needs to succeed, and who should step up to make a difference.

From the article:

"We know that empowering women globally – including farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, women de-miners in Sri Lanka, a legislator in Afghanistan, or a recent college graduate protesting in Tahrir Square in Egypt – is one of the surest ways to create favorable outcomes in poverty alleviation, economic growth, and a country’s general prosperity," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Esther Brimmer recently told students at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. "In fact, we know that as women progress, everyone in society benefits, including men and boys."

When you look at the breadth of challenges facing women and girls globally – including the lack of education and basic literacy skills, sexual and gender-based violence, rampant discrimination, the lack of economic opportunities and political participation, it is clear that working together with other governments, specialized United Nations' agencies, and private partners including non-governmental organizations, academia, and foundations will multiply the impact - reaching more women and girls in more meaningful ways than if the United States acted alone. "It is because of the power of these partnerships that we have been at the fore-front of bringing together diverse groups of governments, foundations, and corporations [to empower women,]" Assistant Secretary Brimmer said.

The United States has also focused on the number of women holding leadership positions. "We know there has been progress on this front; year after year we see more women entering government and taking on senior positions, including heads of state, yet the road forward has at times been rocky and the numbers disproportionate given that women make half of the global population," Assistant Secretary Brimmer continued. "When women are not serving in governments, when their voice and experience are muted, when they are not at the negotiating table, their absence has direct impact on society, on peace and security, on strengthening democracy in the communities, nations and world in which we live."

...

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Certain colleges may have cultures that nudge female students into stereotypically female fields and men into stereotypically male ones, suggests a study whose findings are slated to be presented here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association.

Colleges that have relatively few women among their tenured faculty members and exceptionally small numbers of men among their undergraduates generally have higher levels of gender segregation by major than do other institutions, the study found. So do colleges with football teams in Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, suggesting that those with athletic programs that emphasize male-dominated sports are less likely to encourage the gender integration of various academic fields, according to a paper summarizing the study's results.

Colleges that promote study in the liberal arts, by contrast, tend to have more students go into fields traditionally associated with members of the opposite sex, the paper says.

..

The paper's authors are Jayne Baker, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Toronto, and Ann L. Mullen, an associate professor of sociology there. They based their analysis on federal data on nearly 1.3 million students who earned bachelor's degrees from one of about 1,400 colleges in the United States during the 2004-5 academic year. The data were collected by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

...