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Wednesday, April 23, 2008
By Rodrigo Haro
Collumnist
Nationwide, the enrollment of African-American at colleges and universities is at a record high, but graduation rates remain alarmingly low.
According to a recent study published in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHD) black college enrollment is the highest it has ever been but “the nationwide college graduation rate for black students stands at an appallingly low rate of 42 percent”.
The nationwide graduation rate for white students across the nation is twenty points higher.
But on the bright side, things seem to be improving with the graduation rate continuously rising and the fact that almost half of all black women attending college are graduating.
The article states that “the only positive news we have to report is that over the past two years the black student graduation rate has improved by three percentage points”. Although 42 percent might be discouraging it is higher than previous years and seems to be increasing slowly.
The article also states that if gender is taken into consideration 36% of black men who enter college graduate in six years, although, the graduation rate for black women stands at a substantially higher rate of 47 percent. Women of all races are dominating academia, and it should come as no surprise that Spellman College (an all female college) has the highest graduation rates among all Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
While Spellman’s graduation rate is an encouraging 77%, it is the nation’s most selective and top ranking universities that have the highest black graduation rates with Harvard leading the pack at 95%, as reported in JBHD. The article makes mention of this encouraging fact by reporting that “over the past seven years the black student graduation rate has improved at almost all of the nation's highest-ranked universities.”
This surprisingly high rate can be traced to the fact that “Academically selective institutions are almost always strongly committed to affirmative action”. And more importantly this high graduation rate debunks the “assertion made by many conservatives that black students admitted to our most prestigious colleges and universities under race-conscious admissions programs are incapable of competing with their white peers” (JBHD).
But it should be dully noted that only a minute percentage of the black college population are getting into these selective institutions with high graduation rates.
Black students across the nation are not meeting the expectations of college and this is because the public school systems, where most black college students come from, are failing to prepare them for the rigors of higher education. The journal states, “High dropout rates appear to be primarily caused by inferior K-12 preparation”.
More students are going to college unprepared and more of them are not making it through college. The low numbers of black students in college make “adjusting to college life in an overwhelmingly white environment” a stressful situation and they in turn end up dropping out.
