How Much Do Students Appreciate Faculty Diversity?

• Students generally value faculty diversity, particularly when professors bring visible cultural perspectives that enrich classroom discussion.
• Student evaluations are shaped by more than teaching quality; factors such as career stage, gender, and communication style also influence how they perceive their professors and learning experiences.
• Business schools can use teaching evaluations more effectively by interpreting them in a broader context, pairing them with strong faculty support, and adopting broader measures of instructional quality.

 
Faculty diversity: Accreditation standards emphasize it. Rankings reward it. Students increasingly expect it. Many institutions and faculty genuinely believe in its value. It is no surprise that faculty diversity has become a central focus for business schools around the world.

At the same time, student evaluations of teaching continue to carry significant weight in how schools assess faculty performance. These evaluations influence promotion and reappointment decisions, shape teaching assignments, and often feed directly into accreditation and quality‑assurance processes.

For school leaders, this combination of factors can raise a familiar concern: If we diversify our faculty, how will students respond? Will certain faculty be valued—or unintentionally disadvantaged—by evaluation systems?

Recent evidence suggests the answer is more encouraging than many of us might expect. Students generally value faculty diversity, but their evaluations are shaped by patterns that deserve closer attention. Understanding these patterns can help schools design fairer evaluation practices and create stronger learning environments.

Teaching Evaluations: Useful, but Not Objective

Schools often treat student evaluations of teaching as straightforward indicators of teaching quality. And they do capture important dimensions of learning—clarity, structure, engagement, and relevance.

But evaluations are also human judgments. Students experience teaching through social interaction, and, like everyone, they rely on cues such as communication style, experience, and familiarity when forming impressions.

We find that substantial cultural differences between students and professors lead to higher student evaluations on average.

None of this makes evaluations “wrong.” It simply means that we need to recognize the broader factors that shape student perceptions.

For this reason, schools must interpret evaluations with care, especially in diverse classrooms. As business education becomes more global and more inclusive, evaluation systems need to evolve alongside it.

Students Value Diversity More Than We Assume

We recently conducted large-scale research to better understand how students perceive and value faculty diversity. One of our strongest findings is that a few observable characteristics can shape how students perceive their classroom experience, both positively and negatively.

Cultural difference. Students tend to evaluate professors more favorably when those professors bring clearly distinct cultural perspectives, wide-ranging examples, and global insights into the classroom. We find that substantial cultural differences between students and professors lead to higher student evaluations on average.

For schools, this is an important reminder: Faculty diversity is not only about representation or compliance. When such diverse classroom perspectives are genuine and visible, students often experience it as an educational strength.

Gender. The gender of the instructor continues to influence how students perceive teaching quality, but its effect is more nuanced than a simple advantage or disadvantage.

Students show mild tendencies to rate professors of their own gender higher. These effects are real, but small. More importantly, gender does not operate alone; it interacts strongly with age (as we discuss below).

Career stage. Our research also uncovers the following patterns related to age and experience:

• Younger female professors often receive lower evaluations early in their careers.
• As women gain experience, their evaluations tend to improve significantly, surpassing those of male peers on average.
• For men, the opposite pattern is more common: Evaluations tend to be highest earlier in their careers and decline gradually over time.

These patterns do not imply differences in teaching ability. Rather, they reflect familiar expectations about authority and expertise. Experience carries weight, and students seem to interpret it differently depending on gender.

Experience carries weight, and students seem to interpret it differently depending on gender.

The key takeaway for schools is not about “correcting” students by making them aware of their potential biases, but about recognizing that a professor’s career stage strongly shapes evaluation outcomes.

Language proficiency and clarity. In international classrooms, it is easy to conflate cultural background with language proficiency. The two are related but not the same. Students generally appreciate cultural differences, but they are sensitive to how easily they can follow a professor’s presentation of complex material. Instructors teaching in non‑native languages may face challenges, not because students reject diversity, but because their processing effort increases when a professor’s manner of communication is less familiar.

This distinction matters. It suggests that schools should not treat international faculty as problems to manage, but rather as professionals who may benefit from targeted support—particularly around clarity of speech, pacing, and classroom interaction. Communication support is not about assimilation; it’s about helping faculty convey ideas effectively in multilingual settings.

What This Means for Business Schools

These findings have practical implications in four areas:

Interpreting evaluations more thoughtfully. Teaching evaluations are most useful when viewed in context. Schools will use evaluations most constructively when they do three things: 

• Consider each professor’s career stage when reviewing results.
• Look at patterns over time rather than the evaluations of single courses.
• Avoid direct comparisons across very different teaching contexts.

Blending evaluations with peer reviews and reflective teaching materials helps create a more complete picture of instructional quality.

Supporting early-career faculty. Evaluation patterns suggest that young female faculty can face initial disadvantages. Mentoring, teaching development workshops, and constructive early feedback can make a meaningful difference. These supports are not special treatment; they help ensure that evaluations reflect the quality of student learning, not merely the nature of students’ first impressions.

When schools frame faculty diversity as part of the learning experience, students are more likely to reflect on how different perspectives contribute to their development.

Investing in communication support. Small investments in communication coaching for faculty teaching in non-native languages can yield large returns. Support focused on clarity, structure, and classroom interaction benefits students directly and strengthens evaluation outcomes without diminishing diversity.

Helping students engage with cultural differences. Students also benefit from guidance. When schools frame faculty diversity as part of the learning experience, rather than as background context, students are more likely to reflect on how different perspectives contribute to their development. Orientation sessions, course framing, and even brief conversations in class about how individuals from different cultures approach problems or communication can help students approach differences with curiosity rather than uncertainty.

Implications Beyond the Classroom

These insights also connect to broader priorities in business education:

• For accreditation and quality assurance, these findings support more nuanced and principled evaluation practices.
• For engagement with organizations, they reinforce the idea that diverse teaching teams mirror the realities of modern workplaces.
• For learners, they highlight that learning often happens precisely when perspectives feel unfamiliar.

Our research indicates that students value diversity, experience, and clarity—but in ways that are sometimes less obvious than we expect. When schools interpret teaching evaluations with this in mind, they can make better decisions, support faculty more effectively, and strengthen learning across the institution.

Regardless of how higher education is evolving, teaching evaluations are likely to remain part of our academic landscape. Used thoughtfully, they can do more than inform assessment of faculty performance. They can help schools build fairer, more inclusive, and richer learning environments.

We have built an interactive tool to support educators who would like to achieve more accurate interpretations of teaching evaluations. Based on our research, the SET Bias Correction Tool adjusts for the inherent bias in student teaching evaluations.