Seeking Resources to Disrupt Hidden Curriculum Barriers to Postdoc Success

Academia has an elitism problem in its production and recruitment of future faculty [Flaherty 2022]. The professoriate at R1 research universities originate from a limited number of "feeder" institutions (as small as just 20). However, there are hundreds of PhD-granting institutions in the United States and many hundreds of thousands of PhD trainees (including both graduate students and postdoctoral scholars). This exemplifies the observation that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Is our nation using the full talent potential of those individuals pursuing doctorates? Especially in the STEM disciplines, doctoral researchers could contribute much to our economy and quality of life but are all allowed to do so? Is there a level playing field so that all potential candidates are being considered for training and job opportunities such as for faculty positions?

We believe that barriers such as diversifying the talent pool and the "hidden curriculum" can limit a PhD trainee's opportunities for faculty careers. Below is a description of how we have been tackling this problem and trying to test a hypothesis. This essay is our entry for the 2026 Astera essay competition [Chou 2026].

The mission of our non-profit, DiverseScholar, is to diversify the doctoral STEM workforce particularly in higher education. We have identified issues that affect the training experience and career success of underrepresented postdocs who are the candidates for faculty positions to diversify the academy [Roca 2010a]. Since 2012, we have been developing the tools and resources to aid institutions to diversify their faculty candidate pools [Roca 2010b]. The interventions include our MinorityPostdoc.org career portal and our postdoctoral recruiting conference [Rodriguez & Roca 2017]. For over 20 years, we have also been educating graduate students about the considerations for navigating postdoctoral training [Waite & Roca 2022].

The challenge is that there is limited dedication at the national level to address this problem systematically. The vast majority of resources and attention are directed toward K-12 STEM initiatives. To a lesser extent, there is a "diversity ecosystem" of mentoring organizations and communities that mostly work at the undergraduate to graduate school career transition stage. So DiverseScholar may be the only intervention targeting the postdoctoral to faculty transition from a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approach [Roca 2013].

To be sure, academic institutions have initiatives such as diversity postdoctoral fellowships as documented on our career portal's Resources page. In addition, consortiums among peer institutions have formed to coordinate these efforts at least administratively such as for liberal arts colleges or research universities. However, these fellowships (as well as D.E.I. efforts in general) are under attack by the current federal administration [Meckler et al 2026]. More generally, though, no single (or limited consortium) of academic institutions can address this problem nationally since their main concern is their own campus(es). Schools are in competition with each other for talent. Also, different types of institutions have unique needs such as research vs teaching priorities.

However, the federal government (in the past) stacked-the-deck toward enabling only research universities to attempt to solve this problem by pumping millions upon millions of our tax dollars into projects such as NIH's NRMN or NSF's AGEP or INCLUDES programs. Unfortunately, these large projects collapse after grant funds end since the awardee campus administrators either do not institutionalize the faculty-led efforts and/or the consortium campuses do not continue cooperating with each other (after the federal agency no longer has leverage over them). So overall, this complicated bottleneck makes this challenging problem difficult to address within the existing bias toward favoring R1 universities as the solution bearers.

As an aside, there is also a frustrating problem of the deficiencies of diversity interventions as practiced in academia (and other sectors). Other reports describe the problem sometimes called the "diversity industrial complex", for example [Chen 2020]. Here we'll opine that many millions have been spent (wasted) by academics for recruiting tactics by using diversity (magazine) publishers, databases, and consultants since the 1970s. However, the talent pool of STEM PhD trainees do not read or participate in those channels. Furthermore, yet another campus climate survey will not address recruiting challenges so academic diversity leadership's priorities IMHO are either misplaced or stymied. (Faculty recruiting is a very complicated goal for academic diversity leadership to address as described here [Hatch-Tocaimaza et al 2018].) But now even these diversity initiatives are under threat by the current federal administration. Institutions are shutting down or rebranding away from DEI meaning that the current environment just adds to the systematic barriers to addressing faculty recruitment.

DiverseScholar's approach is to be an institution-neutral broker and service provider to address the talent sourcing problem. As mentioned, we support PhD trainees from any cultural background and almost any discipline. We do mostly focus on STEM and prioritize diversity due to the important role that faculty play in supporting our growing underrepresented minority undergraduate population. Note that previous projections (before the current federal deportation programs) predicted that the USA would become "majority minority" by the 2050s [Pew 2008]. Most importantly, we are proactive in networking and sourcing talent by attending many STEM diversity events, conducting site visits, and doing a lot of online searching [Roca 2012].

Our discipline agnostic approach allows us to be a one-stop shop to benefit an institution's central diversity office that is coordinating with many different departments across their campus. Monitoring an institution's faculty recruiting outcomes is extremely difficult for Chief Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity Officers. Faculty hiring is not always centralized through Human Resource offices as is done with staff positions. Academic Affairs have allowed faculty to run their own show at the departmental level leading to a data tracking nightmare (further contributing to the existing structural problems).

One of the challenging bottlenecks that DiverseScholar faces is the lack of resources to sustain and scale our services. We recognize that this issue might fall under the Essay Competition's admonishment that "we are not looking for proposals that specifically give your own lab more unrestricted money". Oh well, the greater bottleneck is figuring out how to test our hypothesis below.

Our hypothesis is that centralizing a well-prepared talent pool of PhD trainees can diversify the professoriate by making the recruiting process more equitable particularly for underrepresented candidates.

By centralization, we refer to our large database of postdocs for recruiting where we focus on diversity-minded candidates who are, for example, on mission-aligned fellowships or have attended a diversity conference. Scaling this database would take even more resources since the outreach step would target the population of around 62,000 postdocs in the USA. However, NSF estimates that if only considering race/ethnicity, then there are only around 3,000 underrepresented postdocs of color, i.e. Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans (the number increases 2.7X when including domestic Asian Americans) [NSF 2013]. So the numbers are manageable but contacting and recruiting all of them would be laborious since the talent is distributed across the nation. But incentives and policies can be developed to centralize talent pipeline management as occurs in medical fellowship matching or even college-to-pro football recruiting.

The next challenge is fulfilling the "well-prepared" part of our hypothesis. The status quo is the aforementioned elitism of training pedigree dominating hiring considerations. We suspect that top research institutions can teach the "hidden curriculum" that makes candidates more competitive on the academic job market. For example, "chalk talk" presentations of a candidate's future research plans are a critical part of faculty job interviews [Hsu et al 2021]. But, there are few opportunities for PhD trainees to learn about the process especially to practice with feedback. That's why we are compiling learning resources as well as providing chalk talk professional development training [Parks et al 2021]. We are seeking resources to reach more PhD trainees but scaling in-person workshops will always be limited by logistical expenses. Thus, we need to solve the problem of how to deliver this content online. Yet, the practicum exercise is challenging since chalk talks presentations are inherently dynamic and very interactive during the live whiteboarding and concurrent audience discussion. Including a didactic component to teach the PhD trainees adds another layer of difficulty. In short, a simple Zoom meetings tool is not the solution.

Note that for the purposes of this professional development skills discussion, we side-step the very real issue that a faculty candidate's job competitiveness is also tied to their research productivity and scholarship originality. R1 research universities have the resources and talent for a large advantage on those issues. (Also, for this essay, we are focusing on research-centered faculty positions. There are very different expectations for teaching-centered institutions such as PUIs or community colleges [Clement et al 2020].)

Finally, the biggest challenge is conducting the experiment of comparing the test subjects (PhD trainees who have undergone the chalk talk intervention) to an untrained control group to observe the career outcomes of both. This requires a large sample size to have a robust data set. One would also want to match the control group as much as possible to minimize differences that could confound the career outcomes. For example, comparing intervention-trained vs -untrained individuals who are in the same (sub)field, had similar publication records, had the same thesis or postdoc supervisor, etc. Assembling such a matched test vs control experimental pairs is a great challenge; and, we have not raised the issue of comparing minority to non-minority candidates to asses issues of discrimination during the hiring process.

But wait, there's yet another difficult problem concerning a long-term, longitudinal study of career outcomes. The experiment would have to be monitored for years since PhD graduate students and postdocs take a long time to progress through their training. Also, (research) faculty hiring is typically a year-long process that only happens once a year. These constraints make conducting this career development experiment almost impossible. But DiverseScholar is willing to try since this is the purpose of our organization. In fact, we have already been monitoring the career outcomes of the early postdoc cohorts in our recruiting database [Roca 2013].

To our knowledge, this postdoctoral career outcomes experiment has not been conducted. Even though postdoctoral training has existed for 150 years [NPA 2026], there had been very little research scholarship about minority postdocs [Ong et al 2011]. So any studies today are still breaking new ground and are much needed.

Finally, it has not escaped our notice that having a centralized database pooling a critical mass of postdocs training in the USA would enable many other benefits. A nation-wide peer-to-peer support community could emerge. And, novel interdisciplinary collaborations could be catalyzed by breaking out of our (sub)field silos and learning how to communicate beyond our field-specific peers. And, new leverage could combat the existing power dynamics dominating postdoctoral policy decisions about this vulnerable career stage. Critically, we could conduct “exit interview” studies to determine why faculty diversity demographics have been stuck around 1970s levels for so long. Yes, retention is a significant issue. Instead, I'm referring to the more difficult research question to study about "switchers" who leave academia (not the "persisters" who are hired as junior faculty). Do switchers experience academic rejection during the faculty job market _or_ do switchers reject academia altogether by not even applying? Understanding this issue is of paramount importance to the future of our nation's academic enterprise especially during today's threatening times [Johnson et al 2026]

In closing, we welcome this opportunity to describe our strategy, process, and future directions for the Astera essay competition. We believe that we have described "a training pathway that would produce people with skills today's system doesn't reliably produce, but which are crucial for a (nation's) progress."