The Black Colleges With the Highest Student Graduation Rates

By a large margin, the highest black student graduation rate at a historically black college belongs to Spelman College, the academically selective, all-women’s school in the city of Atlanta. In fact, Spelman’s black student graduation rate of 78 percent is higher than the black student graduation rate at 12 of the nation’s 57 high-ranking predominantly white colleges and universities examined in the current JBHE survey.

Spelman’s unusual strength shows in the fact that it has a higher black student graduation rate than such prestigious and primarily white colleges as Colby, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Bowdoin, Chapel Hill, and Carnegie Mellon.

Following Spelman in the rankings, the next-highest black student graduation rate among the HBCUs was at Howard University. At Howard, 62 percent of the entering black students go on to graduate within six years. Claflin University in South Carolina has a black student graduation rate of 60 percent. Hampton University, Morehouse College, and Elizabeth City State University, sadly, are the only other HBCUs that graduate at least half of their black students within six years.

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