DEI Statement Requirements in Faculty Hiring Have More Than Halved Between 2024 and 2025

Substantial decline in DEI statement requirements across faculty hiring between 2024 and 2025

We examined how requests for DEI-related materials in U.S. faculty job advertisements shifted over the past year by analyzing over 10,000 faculty job advertisements from the 2025 hiring cycle and compared them against 2024. Explicit requests for DEI materials fell from 25% of full-time faculty job ads in 2024 to just 11% in 2025—a decline of more than 56% in a single year.

The Decline of the Standalone DEI Statement

The overall decline is concentrated in standalone requirements. In 2024, 13.4% of faculty job ads required a dedicated DEI statement. By 2025, that figure had fallen to just 2.5%. Requirements to address DEI within other application materials (cover letters, teaching statements) also declined, though more moderately, from 12% to 8.5%.

Explicit Requirements Have Declined; Implicit Signals Persist

Even as formal DEI requirements have dropped, 37% of 2025 faculty job ads still signal that DEI will be valued in candidate selection without requiring any formal statement. When combined with explicit requirements, roughly 48% of faculty job ads in 2025 still carry DEI expectations of some kind, down from about 66% in 2024. DEI considerations have not disappeared from faculty hiring so much as shifted form.

What Drove This Shift?

The 2025 hiring cycle followed a period of substantial federal and state pressure. President Trump’s executive orders directed agencies to eliminate DEI programs and put universities’ federal funding at risk; Harvard had over $2.2 billion in grants frozen, and Columbia agreed to a $221 million settlement. As of September 2025, 22 states had passed anti-DEI legislation. High-profile institutional reversals followed, in many cases before any formal enforcement action.

Geographic Variation

The decline in DEI requests has not been evenly distributed. In California, 34% of faculty job ads still include explicit DEI requirements; in states such as Kansas and Alabama, rates have fallen below 1%.

States without anti-DEI laws also saw requirements decline by roughly 50%.

Institutional and Disciplinary Breakdowns

Public vs. private: Private institutions require DEI materials at higher rates (14.5% vs. 9.6% in 2025) and are not bound by state legislation, yet they too have pulled back sharply.

Carnegie classification: Baccalaureate colleges saw the steepest drop (from over 50% to ~20%). Community colleges are the only institution type where DEI requirements increased (4.8% to 8.3%).

Discipline: STEM fields (10.0%) now lag behind social sciences (14.6%) and humanities (14.5%). In 2024, the rates were roughly comparable.

Full-time vs. adjunct: Adjunct and part-time positions show almost no formal DEI requirements—52% have no DEI expectations. This is in tension with a student-benefit rationale: adjunct faculty are the most student-facing, yet DEI engagement is least often required from them.

Viewpoint Diversity Mostly Ignored

Among job ads that require DEI materials, fewer than one in five (17.9% in 2025, down from 22.7% in 2024) mention viewpoint diversity, intellectual diversity, or diversity of thought. DEI requirements in faculty hiring continue to focus almost entirely on demographic diversity, with no corresponding increase in attention to intellectual or ideological heterogeneity.

Conclusion

Explicit DEI requirements in faculty job advertisements declined by more than half between 2024 and 2025, with standalone statements falling from 13.4% to 2.5% across institution types, disciplines, and Carnegie classifications. At the same time, roughly half of all ads still carry DEI expectations in some form, geographic and institutional disparities have widened, and viewpoint diversity remains largely absent from how institutions frame diversity in hiring. Whether these trends persist or reverse will depend on how ongoing legal challenges to executive action are resolved.

*Full report available here.