Collaborative Research: Examining the effects of academic mobility on individual professors’ research activity and institutional human capital at HBCUs

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).HBCUs comprise 3 percent of higher education institutions in the United States but make substantial contributions to the preparation of Black professionals. Despite these achievements, HBCUs, since the 1960s, often lose the battle with non-HBCUs for the most talented Black students and faculty, causing a “brain drain” from HBCUs. Because of social mobility and civil rights movements in the past few decades, the need to investigate academic mobility of faculty at HBCUs is ever-increasing. The goal of this project is to examine two forms of effects of academic mobility. The first is the effect at the institution level, measuring the potential brain drain from HBCUs. The second is the effect at the individual faculty level, assesses the impact of academic moves on their career advancement. Results from this large-scale, longitudinal analysis will provide important evidence regarding the career paths of professors at HBCUs, including those moving to other HBCUs and those moving to other types of institution. This project will identify and seek to understand factors associated with mobility and retention decisions for HBCU faculty and provide data-backed evidence to support a diverse, inclusive, and equitable scientific workforce. The project will collect faculty affiliation data from 35 HBCUs with master- or doctoral-level programs. It will use Internet Archive as the primary data source and LinkedIn, ORCID, and ProQuest as secondary data sources. The project will link large, heterogeneous corpora of faculty affiliation data, Carnegie Classification institution profile data, Web of Science publication and citation data, and survey and interview data. The linked data will be used to conduct expansive, cross-domain examinations of the impact of academic moves on individual professors’ research activity and institutional human capital. The project will employ statistical modeling and historical comparisons in combination with surveys and interviews. The combination of quantitative and qualitative results will provide evidence concerning both the causes of institutional human capital change at HBCUs and the effect of moves on professors’ research activities. This project will contribute new knowledge on academic mobility, particularly for minority-serving institutions (MSIs). The project will design an interactive visual dashboard to share project outputs broadly. The visual dashboard will be updated annually in September for three additional years beyond the conclusion of the project. The results of this project will provide insights for administrators and policy makers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.