Black Bachelor’s Degree Awards Hit an All-Time High

According to the U.S. Department of Education, in the year 2007 blacks earned 146,653 four-year bachelor’s degrees from American colleges and universities. The number of blacks winning bachelor’s degrees increased nearly 3 percent from the previous year, 2006.

In 2007 the number of African Americans earning bachelor’s degrees was the highest in this nation’s history. The figure was nearly 2.5 times the number of bachelor’s degrees won by blacks in 1990.

However, a great deal of progress remains to be achieved. Blacks are now nearly 13 percent of total enrollments in higher education, but in the 2006-07 academic year they earned only 9.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. The African-American college dropout rate is 20 percentage points higher than the rate prevailing for whites.

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