California Community College With Significant Drops in Black Enrollments

Blacks at the Nation's Most Conservative Colleges

The Young America’s Foundation, a right-wing interest group based in Herndon, Virginia, has announced its list of the 10 most conservative colleges in the United States. The group has avoided the far right fundamentalist colleges that are not considered academically rigorous and instead chose colleges that are somewhat selective in their admissions process.

It will come as no surprise that most of the colleges on the Young America’s list have very few black students. Among the top 10 conservative colleges, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California, and the College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri, all have student bodies that are less than one percent black.

Three of the top 10 colleges do not even report racial enrollment statistics to the federal government because they have decided to forgo all federal financial aid. They are Hillsdale College in Michigan, a well-regarded liberal arts institution founded in 1844, Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school founded in 2000 which caters to students who were home-schooled, and Christendom College, a Catholic college founded in 1977 in Front Royal, Virginia, that was founded on the principle that “only an education which integrates the truths of the Catholic faith throughout the curriculum is a fully Catholic education.”

Among the top 10 conservative colleges is only one school with a significant numbers of black students. At Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, blacks are nearly 11 percent of the student body. Liberty University is an evangelical Christian college with extensive distance education offerings.