Thanks for sharing this with us! I agree with Michael, I would be interested to see how your figures compare across disciplines as well in relation to PhDs afforded to different groups in general.

But actually what I was even more curious about is whether you had an idea on how to bring in “class”? I’d suspect that if you were to ask, most people would respond they were middle class (if you could get them to respond of course), since to my understanding the majority of Americans consider themselves to be middle class. One of my professors once joked about how at an University Chicago alumni event he’d asked the alumni what class they considered themselves to be. Almost all of them self-identified as middle class, even though many of them made well over $100,000/year, and had substantial assets.

So, how would you unpack the category of the middle class then? Would you ask people about their parents’ income level? Or education level? Or what stores they shop at for clothes, food?

Here in Brazil with race- and “class”-base affirmative action finally setting in at most universities, the “quotas” are filled by students who have gone through public middle and high schools, and whose family income is below a certain level, and who self-identify as black (unlike the US, this is often a much less self-evident category than class in Brazil).

http://depts.washington.edu/cirgeweb/c/wp-admin/publications/142

I don’t know anything about sample research; is a 45% response rate considered decent?

I don’t think 100% of an attempt to increase diversity in anthropology comes at the expense of other social sciences, but some portion probably does. Another large chunk comes at the expense of diversity in business, politics, etc.

But yes, I definitely support increased collection of data about class backgrounds 😉 I don’t know if I am inherently in favor of nation-wide reporting, though; can’t you find this stuff out through good surveys also? What are the costs/benefits of mandatory reporting vs survey research?

(ps I finally added an option to subscribe to the comments on a post — can you try it and let me know if it works?)

I definitely think looking at other disciplines would help put things in perspective. If one more black anthropologist means one less black sociologist, then its unclear which would be better. The strong increase in the number of BAs to blacks is interesting. I’d also like to see the trend in degree productions for whites. If you think the NSFs data are “outrageously silent” on students class background, then I take it you wish universities were required to report this data? 😉