Six other highly ranked colleges and universities in the United States posted a black student graduation rate of 90 percent or above.

Princeton University ranks third in the nation with a black student graduation rate of 93 percent. Last year Amherst had bested Harvard by two percentage points. colleges and universities.Īmherst College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, now has a black student graduation rate of 94 percent, the second highest in the nation. But now Harvard's black student graduation rate has increased to 95 percent, once again the highest among U.S. But for some unexplained and possibly immaterial reason, Harvard slipped to second place in 2004. The reason is that almost always these are the institutions that have the strongest commitments to race-sensitive admissions.įor many years Harvard University, traditionally one of the nation's strongest supporters of affirmative action, has produced the highest black student graduation rate of any college or university in the nation. In this report we emphasize the graduation rates of black students at the nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities. It is critical to review the statistics to see if this is true. Many opponents of affirmative action assert, often without even looking at the actual data, that black student graduation rates are damaged by race-sensitive admissions. Graduation rates play an important role in measuring the success of affirmative action programs. Turning in a powerful performance, black women have improved their college completion rate from 34 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2005. And over the past decade and a half, the graduation rates for black women have shown strong and steady gains. This year the college graduation rate for black women rose by one percentage point to 46 percent. Over the past 15 years black men have improved their graduation rate from 28 percent to 35 percent. But for the past four years the graduation rate for black men improved by one percentage point and now stands at 35 percent. In each of the three years from 1998 through 2000 there was a one percentage point decline in the graduation rate for black men. Here, 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. This figure is 20 percentage points below the 62 percent rate for white students. Most important, blacks who complete a four-year college education have a median income that is near parity with similarly educated whites.Īccording to the most recent statistics, the nationwide college graduation rate for black students stands at an appallingly low rate of 42 percent.

Department of Education data reveals that, as expected, black students who earn a four-year college degree have incomes that are substantially higher than blacks who have only some college experience but have not earned a degree. On page 11 of this issue of JBHE we report the encouraging news that African-American enrollments at the vast majority of our nation's highest-ranked colleges and universities have shown significant improvement over the past quarter-century.īut a more important statistical measure of the performance of blacks in higher education is how many black students throughout the nation are completing school and earning a college degree.

More encouraging is the fact that over the past seven years the black student graduation rate has improved at almost all of the nation's highest-ranked universities. Percentage points over the past two years. Progress Begins to Show Nationwide, the black student graduation rate remains at a dismally low 42 percent. Black Student College Graduation Rates Remain Low, But Modest

College drop out rate 2020