Dr. J. Quinton Staples II, Ed.D. Founder & CEO, Atlas & Crown

Repositioning the measurement of equity from institutional sentiment to structural capacity.

The Problem That Demanded a Framework

Higher education has accumulated decades of equity programming without a commensurate accumulation of equity outcomes. That contradiction is not accidental — it is architectural. Institutions have invested in climate surveys, cultural programming, and belonging initiatives. They have hired diversity officers, launched task forces, and issued strategic plans. And yet the retention gap for students of color has proven remarkably resistant to these interventions. The question worth asking is not whether institutions want to close equity gaps. Most say they do. The more consequential question is whether they are built to. The answer, for most institutions, is no.

That conclusion emerged from two bodies of empirical work. Dissertation research examining the relationship between MSPS unit power and retention outcomes for students of color across public higher education institutions found that institutional investment in MSPS positively correlates with improved retention outcomes for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial students (Staples, 2025). Subsequent published analysis extended this inquiry by modeling the predictive power of MSPS investment and unit authority for student belonging and retention, establishing a measurable return on equity investment at the institutional level (Staples, 2026). Across both studies, the findings converged on a consistent pattern: what separated institutions that made sustained equity progress from those that did not was not the quality of their programming. It was the presence or absence of structural conditions that gave equity work institutional weight.

Those structural conditions — funding, authority, alignment, integration, legitimacy — constitute an institution's equity infrastructure.

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ was developed to measure it.

What the Index Is

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ (EII) is a quantitatively grounded diagnostic framework that assesses the structural capacity of postsecondary institutions to produce equitable student outcomes.

The EII does not measure what institutions believe about equity. It measures what institutions have built for it.

The framework evaluates six infrastructure domains:

• Fiscal investment in equity-serving functions
• Administrative authority granted to equity leaders
• Organizational positioning within institutional hierarchy
• Alignment between stated priorities and operational decisions
• Integration across student success systems
• Institutional legitimacy — the degree to which equity work is centered, not peripheral, in institutional decision-making

These domains are operationalized through more than forty subdomain indicators, scored using a weighted model that classifies institutions along a developmental continuum from Absent Infrastructure to Exemplary Infrastructure.

The EII sits within the LiberationQuant paradigm — a methodological framework that reorients quantitative inquiry away from student-deficit measurement and toward the interrogation of institutional accountability.

Research Questions the Index Is Designed to Answer

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ provides analytic leverage on questions that conventional DEI assessment tools cannot reach:

• Why do some institutions consistently narrow equity gaps while others — with comparable demographics, mission statements, and DEI programming — show little measurable change? (Staples, 2026; Staples, 2025)?
• What is the relationship between how institutions allocate resources and what those institutions produce for students of color? How does MSPS unit power — characterized by administrators' environmental influence, institutional authority, and negotiation capabilities — shape the effectiveness of equity-focused offices and personnel (Staples, 2025)?
• At what point does an institution's equity infrastructure become the binding constraint on student belonging and retention, regardless of programmatic investment (Staples, 2026)?

These are structural questions. They require structural instruments. The EII is that instrument.

The framework's central diagnostic shift is from asking "Do we have equity programming?" to asking "Does our institutional architecture have the capacity to produce equitable outcomes?" That distinction has direct implications for strategic planning, budget modeling, and leadership accountability.

Why This Moment Requires Structural Analysis

The current higher education environment has made equity infrastructure simultaneously more fragile and more consequential.

DEI units are being restructured, consolidated, or eliminated under legislative and executive pressure in states across the country. Roles that once carried dedicated authority and budget are being absorbed into broader administrative portfolios. Meanwhile, retention and completion metrics are becoming central to funding formulas and accountability mechanisms — creating an environment where institutions that have divested from equity infrastructure are increasingly exposed.

This context makes the empirical case for MSPS investment more urgent, not less. Research conducted within this very sociopolitical landscape — shaped by the acceleration of anti-DEI legislation — demonstrates that the financial decisions institutions make about equity-serving units are not symbolic; they carry measurable consequences for which students stay and which students leave (Staples, 2025, 2026). The argument for equity infrastructure is not ideological. It is organizational performance data.

The EII provides the diagnostic language to make that case. It operationalizes equity capacity in terms that translate directly to institutional strategy, resource allocation, and accountability frameworks.

Methodological and Theoretical Foundations

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ is grounded in four intersecting bodies of scholarship:

Quantitatively anchored. The EII emerged from correlation and multiple regression analyses of institutional-level data linking MSPS expenditure patterns, unit authority structures, and disaggregated retention outcomes for students of color (Staples, 2025). Its published extension models the predictive power of these variables for student belonging alongside retention, establishing equity investment as a demonstrable institutional ROI (Staples, 2026). The Index's indicators are derived from empirical findings, not normative assumptions about what equity work should look like.

Theoretically integrated. The framework draws on Resource Dependency Theory to examine how fiscal and positional power shape organizational capacity; Racialized Organizations Theory to account for how institutions reproduce racial hierarchy through ostensibly neutral structures; Critical Resource Theory to interrogate the politics of allocation; and QuantCrit to ensure that quantitative methodology remains accountable to the racial realities it is measuring (Staples, 2025).

Infrastructure-centered. The EII deliberately shifts the unit of analysis from individual students or cultural climate to the organizational architecture of institutions. This is a choice with consequences: it places the locus of accountability on institutions rather than on the populations they have historically underserved.

Designed for institutional application. The Index is built to function as a diagnostic tool in practice — usable for strategic planning, leadership preparation, equity audits, and policy development — not only as a scholarly construct. The empirical case for that application is already in the literature (Staples, 2025, 2026).

Forthcoming Scholarship and Releases

The complete Equity Infrastructure Index™ framework — including domain-level indicators, subdomain measures, weighted scoring rubrics, classification tiers, and predictive modeling linking infrastructure investment to student success outcomes — will be released through a staged sequence of presentations, publications, and institutional pilot studies.

Forthcoming releases will address:

• How equity infrastructure interacts with retention outcomes across institutional type and control
• The relationship between leadership transition and equity infrastructure sustainability
• Predictive modeling using composite infrastructure scores and disaggregated student outcomes
• Institutional case studies representing the full range of the developmental continuum

Engage the Research

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ is part of a broader research agenda centered on institutional accountability, structural equity measurement, and the LiberationQuant paradigm. Ongoing scholarship addresses equity infrastructure capacity, resource allocation and student success outcomes, the organizational power of multicultural student services units, and the relationship between institutional decision-making and equity performance.

Institutional Engagement

Institutions working with Atlas & Crown can access the Equity Infrastructure Index™ through diagnostic engagements designed to translate structural analysis into organizational strategy. Engagement models include equity infrastructure audits, executive leadership briefings, strategic planning consultations, and retention strategy development.

References

Staples, J. Q., II. (2025). Navigating resources for equity: The relationship between multicultural student programs and services unit power and students of color's retention [Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia]. UGA Open Scholar. https://openscholar.uga.edu/record/26995

Staples, J. Q., II. (2026). Unit power, student belonging, and the ROI of equity: Understanding the predictive power of MSPS for student retention. Youth, 6(1), 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth6010037

The Equity Infrastructure Index™ is an original diagnostic framework developed by Dr. J. Quinton Staples II, Ed.D. All rights reserved.