College Faculty Implicit Bias and Students’ Degree Attainment

• In Event: Policy Levers for Community College Mobility: New Evidence on Access, Transfer, and Equity

Abstract

Faculty from all backgrounds may exhibit biased teaching or advising behaviors (Baker et al., 2021; Milkman et al., 2015; Moss-Racusin et al., 2012; Quinn, 2020)—even without awareness or intent to harm. These biased behaviors are common among faculty regardless of gender or race, suggesting that representation alone may not eliminate implicit biases in higher education. Despite extensive documentation of different faculty-student engagement and treatment by race and gender, there is limited evidence that debiasing interventions close gaps or lead to changes long-term (Lai et al., 2016), particularly in the college setting (Bertrand & Duflo, 2016). Many colleges have offered faculty unconscious or implicit bias trainings in recent years to promote more equitable academic outcomes, but little is known about its impact on students. On the one hand, research shows that debiasing efforts improve faculty perceptions and the academic climate (Carnes et al., 2012, 2015; Jackson et al., 2014) and that raising teachers’ awareness about their biases can close gaps in grades (Alesina, Carlana, La Ferrara, and Pinotti, 2023). On the other hand, explicit efforts to promote diversity may induce backlash, create even more restrictive policies, and exacerbate gaps between groups (McGowan et al., 2025). We partnered with three public community colleges to evaluate the impacts of faculty participation in unconscious bias training on gaps in student outcomes using a randomized controlled trial that involved 618 faculty and 12,253 students. Half of the faculty were randomly assigned to attend a 90-minute training that raised awareness about biases, showed evidence on how biases affect students, and encouraged faculty to develop plans to prevent biased teaching. The training occurred during the 2020 and 2021 academic years and was led by a social psychologist. Following the training, faculty received reminders and tips from the training materials throughout the semester. We find that that the intervention significantly increased the share of black male and white female students completing any degree within two years, by 0.08 pp (33 percent) and 0.07 (22 percent), respectively. Effectively, this intervention eliminated the black-white completion gap for male students. This effect for male students was likely driven by receiving grades that were higher than expected, based on a comparison of surveyed student grade expectations and actual grades in one community college. However, for female students, the main mechanism was improving students’ perceptions of faculty, motivation, and interests. Both these channels suggest that the de-biasing intervention affected faculty’s behaviors.

Author

• Lena Shi, University of California, Irvine
  Presenting Author