Over the past several years, Elena Quiroz has noticed a trend.

For every one Latino faculty member hired, she has watched two leave.

“It’s painful,” said the director of the Latino/a Student Center. “There’s not that much retention.”

Northeastern is in the midst of hiring faculty members for next year, said Vice Provost for Faculty and Graduate Education Luis Falcon, and is aggressively seeking minorities, including African Americans, Asians and Hispanics, to add to Northeastern’s campus.

“We try to recruit minority faculty the same way we recruit for faculty in general,” Falcon said. “We try to cast as wide a net as possible.”

Over the years, Northeastern has seen progress in the hiring of minority faculty members, said Donnie Perkins, dean of affirmative action and diversity. Statistics have shown the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty rising since 2001, but the progress has been slow.

“We should be doing more, we should be working harder to expand the diversity of our faculty,” he said. “We’re making some progress, that’s true, but it’s slow.”

Perkins said while the percentages look good, the numbers don’t. In 2004, Northeastern had 5 percent tenure and tenure-track African-American professors, but that is only 31 professors out of 605, Perkins said.

In order to attract more professors from diverse backgrounds to campus, Perkins said the university attends conferences and works with programs to attract graduate students still earning their doctorate degrees.

“We don’t want to hire people just because they’re minorities,” Falcon said. “We want to hire, and we want to hire well.”

Competition, however, is tough and sometimes many schools will fight over one talented minority candidate, Falcon said.

“My experience is that it’s terribly competitive right now in the market,” he said. “Our hiring budget includes funds to go out and aggressively recruit minority faculty. In some instances it’s not necessary, but it’s to make sure we remain competitive.”

While Northeastern has had some success in hiring minority faculty members, Falcon said, retention is another, more difficult, step in the process.

“Retention is a real problem,” he said. “Boston is a very expensive area, and often junior faculty have big student loans.”

In order to remain competitive, Northeastern would have to counter-balance the cost of living, which is too much money to spare, Falcon said.

Carmen Armengol, an associate professor in counseling and applied psychology, has been at Northeastern for 10 years and received tenure two years ago. She said what made her stay at Northeastern was her easy adjustment to the area and the support of her department.

“My experience is unusual, I have a very diverse department and a very supportive department,” she said. She has also lived in Boston for the past 20 years, so “the move wasn’t as much of a shock to me. I don’t know that everybody has the same experience.”

Perkins said he thinks what Northeastern needs is a more effective plan to attract minority faculty to campus, and even a specialized position created just for that purpose.

“We need a position devoted to recruiting diverse applicants,” Perkins said. He said the idea has already been implemented at Brown University, with “pretty good results,” he said.

While many students have had at least one minority professor at some point in their time at Northeastern, many say it isn’t enough.

“I don’t think they do enough to put pressure on the departments to have [minority faculty],” said Luisa Pe