A Surge in Black Enrollments in Graduate School

Last week JBHE reported that at 23 of the 26 institutions that responded to our recent survey, there were more black women enrolled than black men. But it also is important to note that the gap is more of an issue of race rather than gender. Among whites, women outnumber men at only 11 of the 26 institutions.

In many cases, the racial differences in the gender gap are huge. For example, at Duke University black women make up nearly 63 percent of all African-American enrollments. For whites, women are only 44.8 percent of all white enrollments. This is more than an 18 percentage point difference.

At Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Chicago, and Tufts, black women make up more than 60 percent of the total African-American enrollments. But at all these universities white women are outnumbered by white men. At one half of the universities in our survey the percentage of black women enrollments among the African-American student body is more than 10 percentage points higher than the percentage of Caucasian women in the overall white student body.

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