There are institutions where there is a need for more faculty and those are also the institutions that tend to have the most students from underprivileged backgrounds. In CUNY, we often teach courses with massive enrollments and get our senior-level seminars cancelled if they don't meet a minimum enrollment of 10-15. The demographic problem you mention can't be completely solved by hiring more faculty in systems like CUNY or Cal St, but those are definitely places that could use many more faculty and which also do a great deal to increase the diversity of many disciplines. Of course, as I write, the state of NY is trying to decide whether funding a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills is a greater priority than giving CUNY/SUNY money to hire more faculty and provide more support to students who struggle.
I would certainly agree that any solution based on expanding academia would need to start at the CUNY/ SUNY/ Cal State sort of level, if only because that's far and away the largest sector of higher ed. It's unfortunately also one of the harder places to make the case for expansion, because of who needs to be convinced to pony up the cash...
I don't know the numbers for SUNY or Cal St, but CUNY needs to hire many faculty to return to even its old staffing levels (pre-Pataki--we've been shrinking for almost 30 years), much less approach anything like a private college. Your institution has a student:faculty ration of 9:1. CUNY has a ratio of around 22:1. As you say, the problem is who needs to be convinced. It's a matter of will, not even a matter of finances. In fact, it's really an insignificant amount of cash, particularly when one considers how successful those institutions are at raising people out of poverty and fueling economic growth. What the CUNY faculty union wants for this amounts to about 0.25% of the state budget. That would increase the number of FT faculty by about 10% (about 400 hires). If that happened, we might even get our ratio below 20:1!
There was a massive expansion of colleges and universities following the end of WW2 because of the GI Bill. The ideal solution would be for the federal government to offer to pay full college costs for students who then spend several years after graduation performing some kind of public service. (Military service could count.) Advertise the program specifically to first-gen college students, kids growing up in poverty, and underrepresented groups of all sorts. Find some of the best and brightest who for whatever reason aren't attending college, get them there, and then sell them on the idea of doing public good with their talents.
If you don't drive demand for faculty, the only other solution is to choke the supply, but most of those approaches wouldn't actually work. If you could limit Physics PhD admissions to 2X where X is the number of women admitted, that would both force programs to increase X and to decrease their total admits, but I don't see how that could be achievable.
I think that a lot depends on the field. Physicists will do fine. A physics degree (any level) induces lust in any non-physics employer. (I know. I became a bank lawyer, and it still impresses my colleagues, several decades later.) I'm much more worried about the overproduction of Ph.D.s in humanities and the softer social sciences (i.e., fields of little interest to business schools.) I'm particularly worried about their under-valuation by schools, since humanities training is of more use to more jobs than STEM training. It's twue! Remember, IIT-Kanpur men work for Harvard women.
There are institutions where there is a need for more faculty and those are also the institutions that tend to have the most students from underprivileged backgrounds. In CUNY, we often teach courses with massive enrollments and get our senior-level seminars cancelled if they don't meet a minimum enrollment of 10-15. The demographic problem you mention can't be completely solved by hiring more faculty in systems like CUNY or Cal St, but those are definitely places that could use many more faculty and which also do a great deal to increase the diversity of many disciplines. Of course, as I write, the state of NY is trying to decide whether funding a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills is a greater priority than giving CUNY/SUNY money to hire more faculty and provide more support to students who struggle.
I would certainly agree that any solution based on expanding academia would need to start at the CUNY/ SUNY/ Cal State sort of level, if only because that's far and away the largest sector of higher ed. It's unfortunately also one of the harder places to make the case for expansion, because of who needs to be convinced to pony up the cash...
I don't know the numbers for SUNY or Cal St, but CUNY needs to hire many faculty to return to even its old staffing levels (pre-Pataki--we've been shrinking for almost 30 years), much less approach anything like a private college. Your institution has a student:faculty ration of 9:1. CUNY has a ratio of around 22:1. As you say, the problem is who needs to be convinced. It's a matter of will, not even a matter of finances. In fact, it's really an insignificant amount of cash, particularly when one considers how successful those institutions are at raising people out of poverty and fueling economic growth. What the CUNY faculty union wants for this amounts to about 0.25% of the state budget. That would increase the number of FT faculty by about 10% (about 400 hires). If that happened, we might even get our ratio below 20:1!
There was a massive expansion of colleges and universities following the end of WW2 because of the GI Bill. The ideal solution would be for the federal government to offer to pay full college costs for students who then spend several years after graduation performing some kind of public service. (Military service could count.) Advertise the program specifically to first-gen college students, kids growing up in poverty, and underrepresented groups of all sorts. Find some of the best and brightest who for whatever reason aren't attending college, get them there, and then sell them on the idea of doing public good with their talents.
If you don't drive demand for faculty, the only other solution is to choke the supply, but most of those approaches wouldn't actually work. If you could limit Physics PhD admissions to 2X where X is the number of women admitted, that would both force programs to increase X and to decrease their total admits, but I don't see how that could be achievable.
I think that a lot depends on the field. Physicists will do fine. A physics degree (any level) induces lust in any non-physics employer. (I know. I became a bank lawyer, and it still impresses my colleagues, several decades later.) I'm much more worried about the overproduction of Ph.D.s in humanities and the softer social sciences (i.e., fields of little interest to business schools.) I'm particularly worried about their under-valuation by schools, since humanities training is of more use to more jobs than STEM training. It's twue! Remember, IIT-Kanpur men work for Harvard women.