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| Ranking America's Leading Liberal Arts Colleges on Their Success in Integrating African Americans JBHE now ranks America's leading liberal arts colleges according to their relative success in attracting, enrolling, and graduating African-American students as well as their progress in bringing black professors to their campuses. The liberal arts colleges are graded according to a blending of 13 widely accepted quantitative measures of institutional racial integration. In the Summer 2002 issue of JBHE we presented for the first time our African-American Racial Diversity Rankings for the nation's 25 highest-ranked universities. Now we have completed a similar evaluation of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges. For the past 10 years The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has been collecting standard racial data bearing on the relative success of the nation's leading colleges and universities in bringing black students and faculty to their campuses. We now have in hand a very large and complete database on institutional performance. This puts us in a position to blend our statistics and provide an overall ranking of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges on their comparative success in bringing African Americans into the ranks of higher education. We wish to emphasize that our rankings relate only to the institutional integration of African Americans. Our agenda does not include Hispanics, Asians, or other people of color. Unlike other ranking efforts in the field of higher education, our statistics, without exception, are highly quantitative. This is in sharp contrast to highly impressionistic institutional rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report in which 25 percent or more of the total ranking score is derived from subjective surveys of university reputations as determined by presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions at other institutions. All JBHE data is obtained from our own in-house surveys of the colleges and universities as well as from government sources. Each year JBHE surveys university and college admissions offices to obtain data on applicants, acceptances, first-year enrollments, and black student yield. On a regular basis we also survey deans of faculty at these universities for statistical information on their numbers and percentages of black faculty and black tenured faculty. While one may disagree over what measuring factors are most important, the data we collect is broad-based, solid, quantifiable, and not subject to dispute. In making college decisions young African Americans face a uniquely complicated and stressful decision. The racial climate at the schools they are considering is a matter of prime concern. We intend to give our institutional rankings wide publicity with the hope that our information will help college-bound African Americans identify colleges and universities that suit their goals and expectations. How the Rankings Were Constructed Our evaluation system rates 24 of the highest academically ranked universities in 13 categories or factors of racial diversity. The 13 categories are: • The percentage of blacks in the student body.
Each college was given a score in each of the 13 categories of measured integration of African Americans according to where the institution ranked compared to its peers. In each of the 13 categories the top performer among the 24 highest-ranked colleges received a score of 100. The college that ranked second in each category was given a score of 98. The university with the third best performance in each category was awarded a score of 96, and so on down the line. The university that scored the lowest in each category received a score of 54 points. We have assigned a base minimal score of 54 to all universities. Therefore, success is ranked on a scale of 54 to 100. It will be asked why we have established a minimum score. The reason is found in the impressive long-term progress in racial integration that almost all colleges have achieved. Until the midpoint of the twentieth century, institutions of higher education in the United States had adopted an almost universal rule of racial exclusion. American universities celebrated scholarly ability and they cherished intelligence and learning in student applicants — but not in black people. Some of the colleges in our study were lily-white until the mid-1960s. Nationwide, the progress over the past 40 years has been huge. This fall nearly 600 black freshmen enrolled at these high-ranking liberal arts colleges. Similarly, 40 years ago there were probably only a handful of black faculty members at these liberal arts colleges. All told, the liberal arts colleges in our study now have more than 200 black faculty, 125 of whom hold tenure. When compared to the racial policies of many other institutions in our society such as network television, insurance, and commercial banking, America's colleges, almost without exception, have turned in a history of strong performance. Thus, our assigned minimal score of 54 is intended to provide for the huge progress the colleges in our study have made over the years since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To arrive at an institution's overall score, the college's scores in each of the 13 categories were added together. The total score was then divided by the number of categories for which we had data for that particular school. This calculation produced an average African-American diversity ranking for each college. A school with an overall diversity rating of 100 would have finished first in all of the 13 categories. A university that finished last in all of the 13 categories would have an overall diversity rating of 54. Of course, none of the 24 colleges in our survey comes close to either of these two extremes. The university with the highest overall score was rated first. The university with the lowest overall score was rated twenty-fourth. Additional information on the methodology used and the limitations of this data may be found at the end of this article. The Rankings Amherst College, the small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts, had the highest average diversity rating of the nation's most selective and academically prestigious liberal arts colleges. Also ranking among the top five in racial diversity are Williams College, Colgate University, Wellesley College, and Haverford College. Grinnell College in Iowa was the lowest-ranked institution in our survey followed by Colby College and Trinity College. Here is a brief rundown of the results and commentary on the performance for each of the 24 liberal arts colleges in our survey: 1. Amherst College: Amherst College was founded nearly 200 years ago. In 1826 Edward Jones, a black man, earned a bachelor's degree at Amherst. Over the years it has produced prominent black graduates such as Charles Hamilton Houston, the architect of the legal strategy used in Brown v. Board of Education, William Hastie, the first black federal judge, and Charles Drew, the discoverer of blood plasma. Despite the college's location in a rural, largely white, blue-collar area of western Massachusetts, Amherst College continues its strong tradition of racial diversity. Amherst ranks first in four of our 13 categories: black percentage of the student body, black percentage of first-year enrollments, six-year gain in black freshman enrollments, and black student graduation rate. Also, this past year Amherst College had the highest black student graduation rate of any college or university in the nation. Amherst also ranks near the top in several other categories. A drag on the college's overall score is the fact that the percentage of blacks on the faculty has declined in recent years. Blacks now make up 5.2 percent of the total faculty. Three years ago blacks were 6.9 percent of the college's faculty. 2. Williams College: Williams College, viewed by many as the academically strongest of the group of small liberal arts schools, is also located in rural western Massachusetts. It too posts a strong record in attracting blacks to its campus. Williams ranks high in almost every category in our survey. Nearly 10 percent of the first-year class at Williams this year is black. This is a major gain over the college's performance in recent years. Not all the indicators at Williams are good. The college's percentage of black faculty at 3.5 percent places Williams eighteenth among the 24 liberal arts colleges surveyed. Also, the college has seen its black student graduation rate fall in recent years. 3. Colgate University: Along with Amherst, Colgate has the highest black student graduation rate in the country at 93 percent. This is a huge improvement over the college's performance in recent years. Its percentage of black freshmen at 5.8 percent ranks seventh in our survey and has improved in recent years. Colgate also posted a very high black student yield this year. Colgate ranks low in total black enrollments but its record is improving and the improvement tends to raise its overall diversity rating. 4. Wellesley College: Wellesley, the highly selective women's college in suburban Boston, has shown a significant drop in black enrollments in recent years. Yet it remains near the top of the rankings in both the percentage of blacks in its student body and in its first-year class. Had black enrollments at Wellesley maintained the level the college had achieved five years ago, the college would have, in all probability, placed first overall in our diversity rankings. Wellesley has the highest percentage of black faculty of any of the top liberal arts colleges. The college also maintains a high black student graduation rate of 86 percent. 5. Haverford College: Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia was founded by Quakers. But the college did not admit black students for the first 125 years of its existence. No black student graduated from the college until 1951. In recent years Haverford has made major strides in becoming more racially diverse, especially in the hiring of black faculty. Haverford ranks third among the top liberal arts colleges in percentage of total black faculty and first in its percentage of black tenured faculty. Haverford would have ranked even higher in our survey except for the fact that its currently high black faculty numbers were even better three years ago than they are today. Haverford also has a high black student graduation rate of 88 percent, only three percentage points lower than the rate for white students. 6. Claremont McKenna College: This highly prestigious college in Claremont, California, outside of Los Angeles, posted a very high black student yield in 2002 compared to its peer institutions. Claremont also has significantly improved its yield from our previous surveys. Claremont's black student graduation rate is 80 percent, which puts the college in the middle of the pack among the top liberal arts colleges. But the black student graduation rate is identical to the rate for white students. One caution: Claremont's high ranking in our survey has one flaw. The college has declined to disclose to JBHE its statistics on black faculty. It has been our experience that colleges that choose not to provide answers to some of our survey questions have numbers that they believe are low and may cause some embarrassment to the institution. 7. Swarthmore College: In the late 1990s Swarthmore attracted a larger percentage of black freshmen than any of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges. This performance is reflected in the college's current total enrollment figures as the large number of black freshmen recruited in the late 1990s are now upperclassmen at Swarthmore. But the percentage of blacks in the first-year class at Swarthmore has dropped severely in recent years. In fact, over the past six years Swarthmore has had the largest percentage point drop in black freshmen of any school in this survey. Swarthmore does very well in all measures of black faculty. Today blacks make up 7 percent of the faculty at the college, the second-highest rate among the selective liberal arts colleges. Swarthmore also has shown good progress in increasing the number of black faculty in recent years. 7. Wesleyan University (tie with Swarthmore): Since JBHE began tracking the percentage of black students in the freshman classes of the liberal arts colleges a decade ago, Wesleyan University has finished in first place more often than any other college. This academic year Wesleyan dropped to third place with a freshman class that is 8.3 percent black. Six years ago 11 percent of the first-year class was black. Wesleyan scores in the top half of our rankings in nearly every other category. Wesleyan scores high in total black enrollments, percentage of black faculty, black student yield, and black graduation rate. 9. Carleton College: Carleton College in Minnesota does not score at the top of any of our categories, nor does it score near the bottom. The college has shown impressive performance in increasing the percentage of blacks in its first-year class in recent years and its black student yield is high. Its relatively low black student graduation rate compared to its peer institutions and the large gap between black and white student graduation rates pushed Carleton down in our rankings. 10. Mount Holyoke College: Located in rural western Massachusetts, this single-sex college for women ranks in the middle of the pack in most categories in our survey. The college ranks highest in its percentage of black faculty. More than 6 percent of all faculty members at Mount Holyoke are black, which places the college in fifth place in this category. The black student graduation rate at Mount Holyoke is 76 percent, low for this group of colleges. In addition, the black graduation rate has dropped over the past three years. 11. Vassar College: Vassar College was the last of the Seven Sister schools to admit black students. The college, now coeducational for more than 30 years, is a standout in graduating the black students it admits. The black student graduation rate of 92 percent at Vassar is equal to the rate at Harvard University. Furthermore, the black student graduation rate at Vassar is actually five percentage points higher than the rate for white students. Vassar is one of only a handful of selective colleges and universities in the country where blacks are more likely to graduate than whites. Vassar's success in attracting black students has been mediocre in view of its close proximity to New York City. The college has had better success in hiring black faculty than in attracting black students. 12. Smith College: Another liberal arts, single-sex college for women in western Massachusetts, Smith has traditionally had a more conservative reputation than many of the other liberal arts schools. Due to this stodgy image the college traditionally has had a difficult time attracting black students and faculty. However, as a result of the 1995 appointment of Ruth Simmons as president of Smith, the number of black students seeking admission to Smith increased significantly. But now that Dr. Simmons has left to take the presidency of Brown University, Smith's black enrollments have declined. Blacks make up only 4.3 percent of this fall's first-year class. On a positive note, Smith has improved its black student graduation rate by 9 percentage points over the past three years, a rate that is now only three points below the rate for white students. 13. Davidson College: This year blacks are only 3.2 percent of the first-year class at Davidson, one of the lowest percentages among this group of selective liberal arts colleges. The school also has a very low black student yield. Davidson's black enrollment level is particularly disappointing in view of the fact that it is located in North Carolina, a state with a large black population. In our previous ranking of racial diversity among the nation's 26 highest-rated universities, Duke and the University of North Carolina, both in the same state as Davidson College, finished first and sixth, respectively, overall. In large part these universities' high diversity score was achieved due to their considerable progress in attracting black students to their campuses. Davidson has not enjoyed similar success. On the positive side, Davidson's black student graduation rate of 84 percent is among the best in this group of colleges and the black graduation rate has improved by 10 percentage points in recent years. Davidson has declined to provide JBHE with statistics on the college's black faculty. Because we have no other plausible explanation, we take this refusal to mean that Davidson may have a poor record in this measure. Therefore, the college might drop in our rankings if faculty percentages were included. 13. Pomona College (Tie with Davidson): Another member of the Claremont group of colleges, Pomona scores in the middle of the pack in almost every category in our survey. The college performs best when we compare the graduation rates of black and white students, which are only a percentage point apart. Pomona also has a relatively high black student yield compared to its peer liberal arts institutions. 15. Oberlin College: Over the past century and a half, few liberal arts colleges in the United States can match the record on racial diversity that has been achieved by Oberlin. Black students were admitted to Oberlin as early as 1835. During the Civil War, buildings on the campus were used as stops on the Underground Railroad. Oberlin College also has the distinction of being the first American college or university to award a bachelor's degree to a black woman. Today 8 percent of the student body at Oberlin is black, still one of the highest rates among this group of liberal arts colleges. But in recent years the percentage of blacks in the first-year class at Oberlin has dropped. This year only 4.8 percent of the freshman class is black. Oberlin has always attracted a large number of low-income students. Because of financial considerations, low-income students are less likely to graduate from college than other students. As a result, Oberlin has a very low black student graduation rate. However, the college has improved its performance in this category in recent years. 16. Hamilton College: This liberal arts college in rural upstate New York has traditionally been a laggard in enrolling black students and hiring black faculty. Five years ago only slightly more than 2 percent of the student body was black. But over the past five-year period black enrollments at Hamilton have nearly doubled. They now make up 4.3 percent of all students. This year only 3.5 percent of the first-year class is black, but this is up from 1.6 percent five years ago. The black student graduation rate at Hamilton is now only 75 percent, down from 90 percent a few years ago. 17. Bowdoin College: Despite its location in Maine far from any black population center, Bowdoin College has enrolled black students since the 1820s. Given its location, Bowdoin's progress in the past several years in recruiting black students has been very good. Five years ago 3.4 percent of the first-year class at the college was black. This year 7 percent of the freshman class is black, the fourth best among this group of selective liberal arts colleges. Bowdoin posts a black student yield of 47.8 percent this year, the best among this group of colleges. Coinciding with the dramatic increase in black enrollments has been a decline in the black student graduation rate, which now stands at 76 percent. This is down from 84 percent just three years ago. 18. Washington and Lee University: Only 3.4 percent of the student body at Washington and Lee University is black. Slightly more than 4 percent of this year's first-year class is black. The level of black enrollments at the university is particularly disappointing considering the fact that it is located in Virginia, a state with a large black population. The college also has a black student graduation rate that is lower than most of its peers. Washington and Lee University has declined to provide information to JBHE about its black faculty. The college's overall diversity ranking might be even lower had it disclosed its black faculty statistics. 19. Bryn Mawr College: This highly selective single-sex women's college in suburban Philadelphia excluded black students until the late 1920s. It still has a very low level of black enrollments at 3.8 percent. This figure has declined from five years ago. The college has shown an improvement in black student yield in recent years. But, at 67 percent, Bryn Mawr reports one of the lowest black student graduation rates among this group of liberal arts colleges. 20. Middlebury College: The first black student to earn a college degree in the United States was a graduate of Middlebury College. This occurred in 1823. But Middlebury now appears to be having difficulty in attracting black students to its rural Vermont campus. Only 2.2 percent of all students at Middlebury are black. Probably because of its rural location, Middlebury also has been unsuccessful in attracting black faculty. Only 2.4 percent of the college's faculty is black. Middlebury does post a high black student yield. 21. Bates College: Unlike its in-state peer institution, Bowdoin, Bates Colleges has had very limited success in attracting black students in recent years. Today only 1.9 percent of the student body is black. This year 1.7 percent of the freshman class is black. However, Bates has been far more successful in attracting black faculty. More than 6 percent of Bates' faculty is black, the fourth-best percentage among this group of selective liberal arts colleges. Nearly 7 percent of the tenured faculty at Bates is black, the third-highest level in our survey. The black student graduation rate at Bates is a very low 59 percent, the lowest rate among any of the liberal arts colleges in our survey. 22. Trinity College: Located in Hartford, Connecticut, a city with a very large, low-income black population, Trinity College's freshman class this year is 3.5 percent. The school has a black student yield of only 20 percent. Trinity has also seen a drop in its percentage of black faculty in recent years. Its black student graduation rate of 66 percent is 20 percentage points lower than the rate for white students. 23. Colby College: A third college of this group of selective liberal arts institutions located in the nearly all-white state of Maine, Colby College has a student body that is only 2.2 percent black. This year's freshman class is 2.3 percent black. Three percent of the faculty at Colby is black, down from 4.1 percent three years ago. Colby does better than its peer institutions in Maine, Bowdoin and Bates, in graduating its black students. The black student graduation rate at Colby is 81 percent. 24. Grinnell College: Ranking last in our survey is Grinnell College of Iowa. While its overall black enrollments are 4 percent of the student body, Grinnell scored last in its percentage of black freshmen this year at 1.4 percent. Grinnell posted a black student yield of only 15.6 percent, down more than 20 points in recent years. Grinnell also has a low level of black faculty. One encouraging trend is that the black student graduation rate has improved by six percentage points over the past three years. Explanation of Methodology and
It is clear that in evaluating the progress of an institution in bringing African Americans to its campus there are success or failure factors that are beyond the control of a particular college. For example, it is generally believed that colleges located in rural areas are at a disadvantage in attracting black students and black faculty and therefore will necessarily have a more difficult time achieving a high score in those categories dealing with enrollment and faculty hirings. We agree that this is the case. Readers should consider this fact when drawing conclusions from our data. We note, however, that some colleges such as Bowdoin and Colgate, located in rural or suburban areas, have relatively strong records in either enrolling black students or engaging black faculty. When we are dealing with liberal arts colleges, many of which are quite small, the addition of only a few black students or one or two black faculty members can have a major impact on the percentages in a given category. For example, there are five black faculty members at Colby College. They make up 3.1 percent of the 159 faculty members at the college. But if Colby suddenly hired two more blacks, its percentage of black faculty would jump to 4.4 percent and move the college up several places in the ranking for that category. Therefore, it must be kept in mind that only small changes in the number of black students or black faculty could dramatically change a college's position in these rankings. The Question of Weighting After careful consideration, we decided to rate each category equally in our rankings. Rather than assign an arbitrary weighting to any given category, we believed the best course was to treat all of these important indicators equally. We note that if we were to double the weighting of categories, such as overall black enrollment or overall black faculty, there would be little change in our rankings. The top and bottom places would remain the same, with some minor shuffling of universities in the middle of the pack. Readers who believe any particular category should be weighted differently or who conclude that some categories ought to be eliminated should contact JBHE and make their case. The data is presented in such a way that new calculations can be made using any weighting desired. The Inclusion of Graduation Rate Data Some readers may ask about the role of black student graduation rates in our calculations. We feel that graduation rate data is an important indicator of a college's commitment to the successful education of black students. A high college graduation rate tends to indicate a strong faculty and administrative commitment to black students. Also, a positive graduation rate is an indicator that black students are happy and are showing good academic performance at a given college. Some contend that a high black graduation rate tends to show an absence of academic rigor. But there is little evidence that this is the case. All of the colleges in our rankings are academically rigorous. Race may be taken into account in admissions to these colleges, but it is not a significant factor in grading. We do note one weakness in the use of the graduation rate statistics. All government studies show that the most important factor causing high black student dropout rates in college is family economic pressures. Therefore, a university with a strong commitment to the laudatory goal of admitting large numbers of low-income blacks may have its graduation rate damaged by its admissions outreach policy. How Missing Data Affects the Calculations Readers will ask about the implications of missing statistics. At the present time three of the 24 colleges do not report black student yield figures. Colleges often refuse to reveal student yield data for black students because they don't want competitive schools to know this information. For both high-ranking universities and liberal arts colleges, the reluctance to divulge student yield data is restricted to only the very highest ranking institutions. Our guess is that the black student yield at Amherst, Williams, and Wellesley is above average for this group of colleges. Three other schools declined to provide statistics on black faculty. They are Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College, and Washington and Lee University. The omission of data on black faculty is quite different from the decision not to report black student yield. It is our experience that colleges that decline to provide information on their level of black faculty are not proud of their record in this area. Readers must take this into account when assessing these schools' overall ranking. It is our opinion that in all probability, if the three schools that declined to provide data on black faculty had done so, their overall diversity score would be lower. The omission of data on student yield and black faculty at some colleges does have a small impact on the overall rankings. But because we take the total score for each school in all categories and divide the score by the number of categories we have data for that particular school, we arrive at an average ranking. This tends to neutralize the impact of missing data. Obviously, we would have preferred to have complete data on black student yield for all 24 schools, but the missing data is not significant in the overall picture. One final comment: Clearly there are other factors that go into the overall racial climate at a given college which cannot be measured by the standard indices of institutional racial integration. These include attitudes of faculty toward black students, patterns of residential segregation on campus, attitudes of white students toward racial minorities, and, particularly, the seriousness and frequency of campus incidents of racial animosity or violence. For nearly 10 years, JBHE has collected and published incidents of campus racial hate occurring in a wide variety of institutional settings. But we have no reliable information on the frequency of incidents of racial hate on the campuses we cover. All the reports are necessarily anecdotal. Missing Data We Would Like to Have Moreover, there are no consistent figures on the racial makeup of a school's administration, support staff, police force, or service staff. Nine years ago JBHE employed the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information on the racial makeup of administrative, faculty, clerical, construction trade, and service staff positions at major colleges and universities. After several years of legal efforts, we obtained figures from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the U.S. Department of Labor, but the statistics provided were hopelessly out of date. Also, we have no information on the extent of cultural activities geared toward black students at particular campuses. Finally, we have no measurable information on the strength of the black student organizations on campus. Despite these missing elements that might have entered our ratings report, we believe that our broad assortment of highly quantitative data measuring the state of racial integration provides an excellent guide to whether a given liberal arts college is committed to the education of African Americans and is providing a happy place for them to be.
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