Black Freshman Enrollments Are Up 8 Percent at the University of South Carolina: But the Record Over the Past Decade Is Poor

This fall, the University of South Carolina has the largest freshman class in its history. There are more than 4,550 first-year students on campus.

Black freshman enrollments are up about 8 percent from a year ago, when 287 black freshmen enrolled. While African Americans make up 28 percent of the college-age population in South Carolina, blacks make up only 7 percent of the first-year enrollments at the state’s flagship university. Women make up 55 percent of black first-year students.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Education show that in 2009 blacks make up 11 percent of the total undergraduate enrollments at the University of South Carolina. This figure is likely to drop due to smaller percentage of blacks in the first-year classes in each of the last two years. In 2001, 18.7 percent of the undergraduate students at the University of South Carolina were black.

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