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Increasing representation of racially underrepresented groups and women in the ocean sciences has been a priority for the last few decades. The Ocean Science Educators’ Retreat (OSER) data set is perhaps the only long-standing data set specifically focused, with subdisciplinary granularity, on the US academic ocean science landscape. We examine its valuable data on graduate student and faculty demographics across racial and gender dimensions to understand trends in diversity of graduate students (recruitment and retention) and faculty in US institutions over a 15-year period (2007–2021). We also discuss potential COVID-19 signals and attention to social justice in these data, based on the last year of data collection (2020–2021). Finally, we make suggestions for future studies to build on these findings and the OSER data set. This paper highlights opportunities for further broadening diverse participation in ocean sciences, such as through greater emphasis on retention, and makes a case for the ocean science community to continue demographic data collection.