Agricultural Economics, Department of
Cornhusker Economics
Demographic Match Between Colleges of Agriculture and Their States
Date of this Version
11-12-2025
Document Type
Newsletter Issue
Citation
Cornhusker Economics (November 11, 2025)
Agricultural Economics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
This report examines whether the undergraduate demographics in the Colleges of Agriculture at four Midwestern land-grant universities—UNL (CASNR), Iowa State (CALS), Kansas State (Ag), and Missouri (CAFNR)—are keeping pace with the increasing diversity of their respective states, with a special focus on Underrepresented Minority (URM) students. This analysis is urgent because, despite some progress, most Colleges of Agriculture still enroll a smaller URM share than their states, and Black and Hispanic workers remain underrepresented in the STEM workforce (National Science Board & National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2024). Furthermore, the region's recent growth has been disproportionately driven by people of color (Kayitsinga, 2022), emphasizing the need for these land-grant institutions to better reflect the populations they serve.
Conclusion
The analysis confirms that all four Midwest Colleges of Agriculture trail their state URM benchmarks. UNL CASNR faces the most severe gap, which is primarily an entry-point shortfall that severely constrains its overall URM representation. The persistence of the RI gap across all institutions, despite some raw gains, emphasizes the need for coordinated, sustained, and integrated strategies that focus on high-impact interventions, especially in large, flagged program clusters, to move decisively toward true parity.