The Black Colleges With the Highest Black Student Graduation Rates

By a large margin, the highest black student graduation rate at a historically black college belongs to the academically selective, all-women Spelman College in the city of Atlanta. In fact, the Spelman black student graduation rate of 77 percent is higher than the black student graduation rate at many of the high-ranking predominantly white colleges and universities in the nation.

Spelman’s unusual strength shows in the fact that it has a higher black student graduation rate than do such prestigious and primarily white colleges as Bates, Colby, Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Claremont McKenna, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Carnegie Mellon.

Following Spelman in the rankings, the next-highest black student graduation rate among the HBCUs is at Fisk University. At Fisk, 63 percent of the entering black students go on to graduate within six years. Hampton University, Miles College, Howard University, Morehouse College, and Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina sadly are the only other HBCUs that graduate at least half of their black students within six years.

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