Student Group Gives Low Grades to North Carolina State University’s Efforts to Increase Racial Diversity

The African-American Student Advisory Council at North Carolina State University in Raleigh gave the institution an overall grade of D in its efforts to foster racial diversity.

For student enrollment, the report card recorded a grade of F. The council noted that in 1995 there were 467 black students in the freshman class at North Carolina State. Over the past five years, the largest number of black students in the entering class was 418. During this period the overall number of students in the entering class increased significantly.

The university’s effort to hire black faculty also received a grade of F. About 4 percent of the full-time faculty is black.

The university fared slightly better with a grade of C in the area of retention and graduation of black students. The report found that the black student graduation rate had improved from 51 percent to 58 percent. But this progress was overshadowed by the fact that the black graduation rate still trails the rate of whites by about 20 percentage points.

Copyright © 2006. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.