Nearly 11 Percent of Students Admitted to Harvard This Year Are Black

Harvard University reports that it received a record 29,112 applications this year. Nearly 3,700 of all applicants were valedictorians of their high school class and more than 6,000 student applicants scored an 800 on either the reading or mathematics SAT college entrance examination. Overall, only 7 percent of all applicants were admitted, also a record low for the university.

Harvard also had a record number of black applicants this year. Harvard reports that 10.8 percent of all admitted students are African Americans. This is an increase from a year ago when 10 percent of all admitted students were black.

Typically the black student yield at Harvard is lower than the applicant pool as a whole. In 2008, 10 percent of admitted students were black but 8.4 percent of the students who actually enrolled this past fall were African Americans.

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