One foot out the door: interrogating the risky hire narrative in stem faculty careers

Many faculty members believe that the racial demography of their disciplines afford highly qualified, racially minoritized scholars more power in the academic job market. As such, search committees may not offer faculty positions to candidates from these groups because they perceive them to be high risk and difficult to retain. One often cited study debunked this myth, showing that highly competitive racially minoritized candidates did not have more offers; however, the study was published over two decades ago and the narrative still remains. Using publicly available data from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, we identified 671 awardees and found no statistically significant differences in rates of early departure between highly qualified, racially minoritized scholars and other highly qualified racial groups across three different science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. We also used data from U.S. News and World Report university rankings, and the FY 2007 Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges to understand whether early departing faculty members across all racial categories leave for more prestigious institutions, as is assumed. Those results indicate a slight trend of early departing faculty members leaving for more prestigious institutions than their previous one. We situate these findings within the faculty diversity discourse and offer implications for practice and future research.