The Majority Of America’s Top-Ranked Colleges Will Be Led By A Woman Or Person Of Color This Fall

Eleven of the top 20 colleges in America, as ranked by Forbes, will be led by a woman or person of color by next fall, marking a milestone in the demographics of the presidencies at the nation’s most highly esteemed institutions. The new leadership profile has emerged following a spate of presidential resignations, retirements and replacements at prestigious universities during the past 18 months.

The eleven institutions are:

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which appointed Sally Kornbluth to be its new president, starting this January;
• Harvard University, which recently hired Claudine Gay, the first Black person and only the second woman to be named the university’s president, succeeding Lawrence Bacow;
• The University of California, Berkeley, where Carol Christ has served as chancellor since 2017;
• Columbia University, where Nemat "Minouche" Shafik, will soon become its first female president;
• The University of Pennsylvania, headed by M. Elizabeth “Liz” Magill;
• Dartmouth College, where Sian Leah Beilock will be the first woman to serve as its president;
• Cornell University, where Martha E. Pollack serves as its 14th president;
• Brown University, with Christina Paxson as its 19th president;
• Rice University, which hired Reginald DesRoches to be its president in 2022. He is the first black man to lead that institution;
• Williams College, where Maud Mandel began her term as president in 2018;
• The University of California, San Diego, headed by Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, an Indian-American scientist, who was appointed chancellor in 2012.

One indication of the magnitude of this leadership change is that six of the eight Ivy League institutions, all of which made Forbes’s top 20, will be led by a woman, the first time in the history of those schools that so many women have served in that capacity.

As another point of historical comparison, of the eleven top-20 schools that will be helmed by a woman or person of color when the fall, 2023 semester begins, only four - Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, San Diego - had such leadership just ten years ago.

And looking back at all of the current top 20 institutions, a decade earlier in 2013, only five - the four above plus Princeton University, where Shirley Tilghman stepped down as president in 2013 - had a woman or person of color holding the top spot.

The current configuration of campus leaders represents progress to be sure, but it does not negate the fact that there are still large gender and racial minority gaps in major university presidencies. A 2022 report by the Eos Foundation entitled The Women's Power Gap at Elite Universities: Scaling the Ivory Tower, conducted in partnership with the American Association of University Women, found that:

• At 130 major public and private, R1 universities, only 22% had a woman in the top position of president, chancellor or system head, despite the fact that women have been earning the majority of Ph.D.s in the U.S. for about a decade.
• While six of the universities had at least three women as presidents in their history, 60 of them had none.
• The gap is much wider for women of color, where only 5% of the institutions had a woman of color in the top executive position, despite the fact that about one in five Ph.D. earners is a woman of color.
• The gender gap extends to the leadership of the institutions’ governing boards as well, with women occupying only 26% of board chair positions.

The problem is not - as the report documents - the lack of a talent pipeline with a sufficient number of women prepared to become campus leaders. In fact, many women hold significant positions at lower rungs on these universities’ administrative ladders. Women comprised 39% of the academic deans and 38% of the provosts. But the top spot remains a different story. There, the gender divide was much larger - with only 22% of campus presidencies and 10% of university system presidencies held by women.

So the upcoming composition of leaders for America’s elite universities prompts a question of perspective: Is the glass ceiling half cracked or half intact?

Whatever your answer, the nature of that leadership will be tested by several significant challenges this year. If affirmative action in college admissions is found illegal by the Supreme Court, how will colleges respond? Can Americans’ sagging confidence in higher education be restored? How best can institutions answer the increasing mental health needs expressed by students? And can our wealthiest colleges do a better job of admitting and graduating more students from low income backgrounds?

Effective leadership by the nation’s most visible university presidents will be key to addressing each of these issues.