Surge in Black Enrollments in Graduate School

The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Education show that in 2005 there were 207,968 blacks enrolled in graduate school. This is up from 197,472 in 2004, an increase of 5.3 percent. A decade ago there were 119,000 black students enrolled in graduate programs. So over the past decade there has been a whopping increase of nearly 75 percent in black graduate school enrollments. Today blacks make up 9.5 percent of all enrollments in graduate school. A decade ago blacks were 6.9 percent of total enrollment in graduate school.

Black progress in professional school enrollments has not been as spectacular. In fact, in 2005 there was a slight drop in black professional school enrollments from a year before. This is undoubtedly the result of a continuing decrease in the number of blacks enrolling in law school.

In 2005 there were 24,163 blacks enrolled in professional schools. They made up 7.2 percent of all students enrolled in professional schools nationwide. Over the past decade there has been a 14 percent increase in black professional school enrollments. But the black percentage of total enrollments in professional schools has remained about the same.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.