Columbia Leads the Ivy League by a Large Margin in Black Freshman Enrollments

There are 190 black first-year students at Columbia University in New York City. They make up a whopping 13.7 percent of the freshman class. In 2008 there were 162 black first-year students at Columbia. They made up 12.1 percent of the entering class.

Columbia’s performance in enrolling black students is record-setting. This is the largest percentage of black students in the first-year class of any of the nation’s 30 highest-ranked universities or the 30 highest-ranked liberal arts colleges in the 17 years JBHE has conducted its annual survey of black freshmen at our leading educational institutions.

Columbia holds a wide lead over all seven other Ivy League colleges. Harvard has the second-highest level of black first-year students at 9.6 percent. Dartmouth ranks third at 8.9 percent.

Among the Ivy League institutions, Brown University has the lowest percentage of black students in its freshman class. Blacks make up 6.2 percent of the freshman class at Brown.

Copyright © 2009. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.