University of Cincinnati Looks to Increase Racial Diversity of Students and Faculty

A new report prepared for the president of the University of Cincinnati calls for a more concerted effort to enroll more black students, increase retention and graduation rates of minority students, and to hire more faculty of color.

At the present time, blacks make up 9.6 percent of the 41,000 undergraduates at the university, a level that has remained stagnant in recent years. The black student graduation rate is 40 percent, 15 percentage points below the rate for the student body as a whole. There are 80 black faculty members at the university, an increase of only two from 10 years ago. Blacks are 3.9 percent of the total full-time faculty.

The new report calls for an increase in scholarship aid and a larger budget for recruiting black and other minority faculty.