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The Progress of Black Student Enrollments at the Nation’s Highest-Ranked Colleges and Universities For the fourteenth consecutive year, JBHE publishes its survey of the percentages of black first-year students at the nation’s highest-ranked universities and liberal arts colleges. (The full text of this article is published in the Autumn 2006 issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.)
Almost all of the major universities have recognized the value of seeing comparative information on black enrollments. In 2004, Tufts, the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago did not provide data on black first-year enrollments to the JBHE research department. For the past two years we have been pleased to have had the cooperation and data from all of the nation’s highest-ranked universities. Here are the results of this year’s survey. After four consecutive years of ranking No. 1 in our annual survey, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lost its position in 2003 as enrolling the largest percentage of black freshmen among the highest-ranking universities. In 2003 Stanford University had captured the top spot in our rankings. It currently ranks second. In 2004, for the first time, Duke University took the top position in our survey. This year Duke ranks third. However, in 2005 and again this year, Chapel Hill has the highest percentage of blacks in its first-year class. Chapel Hill reports that 470 black freshmen enrolled on the Chapel Hill campus this fall. This is up 13 percent from the 416 black freshmen who enrolled a year ago. Blacks make up 12.3 percent of the first-year class at Chapel Hill. This is the second-highest percentage of black first-year students at any of the nation’s 30 highest-ranked universities since JBHE first began its annual survey 13 years ago. Four years ago in 2002, blacks were 12.5 percent of the entering class at the Chapel Hill campus. Through the years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill accepted a larger percentage of black applicants compared to the application pool as a whole. This year, 33 percent of black applicants were accepted compared to 34 percent of all applicants. The university saw a jump in black student yield from 51 percent to 57 percent, resulting in the near-record level of black first-year enrollments. As mentioned, Stanford University ranks second in this year’s survey. There are 167 black freshmen at Stanford this fall. They make up 10.1 percent of the first-year class. This past spring, the campus of Duke University was rocked by charges that three white members of the lacrosse team raped a black student from nearby North Carolina Central University. The woman, who had been hired as an exotic dancer for a party off-campus hosted by a lacrosse team member, was allegedly subjected to slurs and other racist comments prior to the reported assault.
In past years Duke has declined to report to JBHE black student acceptance rates or black student yield. But this year Duke reported this information to JBHE. Just over 27 percent of all black students who applied to Duke this year were accepted for admission. This is only slightly higher than the acceptance rate for whites. So it appears that Duke did not accept a higher number of blacks in anticipation of difficulty in attracting black students because of the lacrosse team scandal. Duke’s black student yield of 33.3 percent is lower than that of Ivy League institutions but is in line with the black student yield at such institutions as Northwestern, Emory, Wake Forest, and the University of Chicago. Columbia University and Vanderbilt University tied for fourth place in this year’s survey with freshman classes that are 9.4 percent black. The progress at Vanderbilt University over the past decade has been extraordinary. Over the past decade the number of black freshmen at Vanderbilt has nearly doubled. In 1995 only 4 percent of all freshmen at Vanderbilt were black. This year the figure is 9.4 percent. Vanderbilt moved from 10th place in last year’s survey to a tie for fourth, its highest level in the 14 years JBHE has conducted its survey. Five of the eight Ivy League institutions fall into a narrow range where their freshman class is between 8.8 percent and 9.4 percent black. Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell rank lower and are at the bottom of the Ivy League in black enrollments. However, it must be noted that the percentage of blacks in the first-year class at Cornell University has increased in each of the past four years. This year there are 192 black freshmen at Cornell. They make up 5.9 percent of all entering students. This is the highest level of black enrollments since JBHE first conducted its survey 13 years ago. In each of the early years of our survey, the University of Virginia reported the highest percentage of black freshmen of any of the nation’s high-ranking universities. But in subsequent years the university appeared to have back-pedaled somewhat in its commitment to increasing the racial diversity of its student body. This trend seemed to halt in 2005 when blacks were 10.5 percent of the entering class. This placed the University of Virginia in second place in our 2005 survey. But this year the number of black students in the freshman class at Charlottesville is down nearly 19 percent, from 319 to 260. Once again, the lowest percentage of black freshmen occurs at the California Institute of Technology. There are three black freshmen at CalTech this year. In both 2004 and 2005 there was only one black freshman at CalTech. On three occasions over the past 13 years there have been no black students entering the freshman class at CalTech. Eight has been the highest number of black freshmen attained in any year in that period.
Located on opposite coasts of the United States, MIT and CalTech couldn’t be further apart in terms of black enrollments. According to the latest Department of Education data, blacks make up 5.8 percent of the total enrollments at MIT but only 0.8 percent of all undergraduates at CalTech. In this year’s entering class, the annual JBHE survey of black freshmen shows 81 blacks among the first-year students at MIT but, as stated, there are only three black freshmen at CalTech. Blacks make up over 8 percent of all first-year students at MIT. At CalTech, blacks make up 1.4 percent of the entering class.
Short-Term Gainers For the 30 high-ranking universities in our survey, it is encouraging to report that 17 universities showed gains in African-American first-year enrollments. Thirteen high-ranking universities had declines in their number of African-American freshmen. CalTech, with three black freshmen this year compared to only one last year, had the largest percentage increase. The University of Chicago has a rich history in providing educational opportunities for African Americans at the graduate level. But in recent years, black undergraduate enrollments at the University of Chicago have usually lagged those of the university’s peer institutions by a considerable margin. But this fall there are 81 black freshmen at the University of Chicago. This is an increase of more than 52 percent from a year ago. This year, blacks are 6.4 percent of the entering class, up from 4.9 percent a year ago. Dean of Admissions Ted O’Neill told JBHE that “for the first time, we hosted an overnight for black students in the fall. Not only did we have the chance to spend time with the overnight visitors, but our own students became more involved with the recruitment effort.” Dean O’Neill also notes that the new Collegiate Scholars program at Chicago’s public schools is now producing qualified recruits. The program includes 60 students who complete a three-year academic preparation course during the school year and over the summer months. Collegiate Scholars are eligible for five full-tuition scholarships that the University of Chicago gives out each year to graduates of this program. A year ago John Jenkins, the new president of the University of Notre Dame, stated that one of his five primary goals at the beginning of his tenure was to increase diversity in both the student body and faculty. It appears that the admissions office took the president’s goals to heart. They made a concerted effort to increase the number of black and other minority students on campus. Financial aid to low-income students was increased. A more determined outreach effort was made to black students who were admitted to the university in an attempt to convince them to enroll. The number of blacks applying to Notre Dame in 2006 was up nearly 10 percent from a year ago and a slightly higher number of blacks were accepted for admission. But Notre Dame made huge strides by increasing black student yield from 40.2 percent to 53.4 percent. This black student yield is among the highest of the nation’s 30 top-ranked universities. Notre Dame attributes the higher yield to its visitation weekends where accepted students are invited to campus to see for themselves what Notre Dame is like. There are 95 black first-year students at Notre Dame this fall, an increase of nearly 44 percent from a year ago. Washington University, Brown University, the University of Southern California, Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt also posted at least a 10 percent gain in black freshmen this year compared to 2005. Seven high-ranking universities posted declines in black freshmen of greater than 10 percent. They are the University of Virginia, UCLA, Wake Forest University, Rice University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, and Tufts University. The drop in black students was particularly severe at Tufts. There, the number of black students dropped from 90 in 2005 to 53 this year, a decline of 41 percent. There are 99 black first-year students at the University of California at Los Angeles this fall. They make up only 2 percent of all first-year students at UCLA. The black presence on the UCLA campus is lower now than at any time since the 1960s. Admissions officers are restricted by California state law from using race as a factor in the admissions process at UCLA. This year, only 11 percent of the 2,166 black applicants were admitted to UCLA. The university’s overall admittance rate is nearly 26 percent. In an effort to increase diversity in the student body, the UCLA administration has adopted a new admissions model that will follow a “holistic” approach which looks at academic merit in the context of a student’s position in society. Under the new plan, a student of any race who comes from a low-income family and attends high school in an inner-city school district that has a poor record in sending kids on to college might be seen in a more favorable light by admissions officials than a student with slightly higher academic credentials who grew up in an upper-middle-class family and attended high school in a wealthy suburban district.Officials at UCLA hope to use the new admissions model for the class entering the university in the fall of 2007. The new plan is patterned after the “comprehensive review” admissions model used at the University of California at Berkeley. Admissions officials at UCLA hope that their new plan will result in an increase in the number of black students at the university. But it must be noted that under the comprehensive review plan used at Berkeley, blacks make up only 3.3 percent of the first-year students on campus this fall. This is higher than the black percentage of freshmen at UCLA but still well below the level of black enrollments that existed prior to the enactment of the ban on race-sensitive admissions.
The Institutional Acceptance Rate by Race: A Good Yardstick to Measure Commitment to Racial Outreach The percentage of black applicants who receive invitations to join the freshman class is a strong gauge of an institution’s commitment to racial diversity. This figure remains the most sensitive of all admissions data. This is particularly true for the very highest ranked institutions. Of the 30 highest-ranked universities that responded to our survey, eight declined to reveal their black acceptance rates to JBHE. Unquestionably, public and private threats to affirmative action policies in college admissions have been a factor in producing this sensitivity. With this in mind, admissions officers — who on the whole are profoundly supportive of affirmative action — are concerned when statistics on black admissions are made available to the public. There are standard concerns too that racial conservatives on faculties and among alumni and trustees may interpret the figures as showing a so-called dumbing down of academic standards and a favoring of “unqualified” blacks over perhaps more qualified whites. But it is critical to keep in mind that an institution’s high black acceptance rate often indicates nothing more than the fact that the admissions office of a given institution has a very strong and well-qualified black applicant pool. At 14 of the 22 universities that supplied data to JBHE, the black student acceptance rate was higher than the acceptance rate for white students. In some cases the differences were substantial. For instance, at MIT the black student acceptance rate of 30.8 percent was more than twice as high as the 13.3 percent acceptance rate for all applicants. At the University of Notre Dame 48.4 percent of black students were accepted compared to 27.3 percent of all applicants. At the University of Chicago 55 percent of blacks were accepted whereas 39 percent of all applicants received notices of acceptance. Eight of the high-ranking universities we surveyed had black acceptance rates that were lower than the overall acceptance rate. At the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at Los Angeles, which were prohibited from taking race into account during the 2005 admissions process, the black acceptance rate was significantly below the rate for whites. The black acceptance rate was also lower than the white rate at Washington University, Emory University, the University of Southern California, Rice University, the University of North Carolina, and Wake Forest University.
Black Student Yield: Harvard Regains the Lead So-called yield, the percentage of applicants who decide to go to a college that issues an invitation to them, has become the standard measure of an institution’s strength and drawing power. For most of the past 20 years Harvard University has been the nation’s gold standard in student yield percentage for both black and white students. But in both 2002 and 2003 this gold standard in student yield moved to Stanford University. In 2003 the black student yield at Stanford was 67.9 percent, the highest in the country. In 2005 and again this year, Harvard University posts the highest black student yield. Among the 24 universities that disclosed black student yield statistics to JBHE this year, Harvard had the highest rate at 70.9 percent. MIT had a large jump in black student yield from 47.8 percent in 2005 to 66.4 percent this year. This was the second-highest yield rate next to Harvard’s. Stanford’s black student yield has dropped to 61.4 percent, which is third in our rankings. Among the top-ranking universities, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Notre Dame were the only other schools to produce a black student yield of over 50 percent. The lowest black student yield of 18.1 percent was found at Carnegie Mellon University. Johns Hopkins, Emory and Tufts had black student yields below 25 percent.
Black Freshmen at Liberal Arts Colleges
But this year Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia ranks in the top position. Black enrollments at Swarthmore have been on a rollercoaster ride in recent years. In 1998 there were 43 black freshmen in the entering class at Swarthmore College. They made up 11.6 percent of all first-year students at Swarthmore that year. This was the highest percentage of blacks in an entering class of the nation’s highest-ranked liberal arts colleges ever recorded by the annual JBHE survey on black freshman enrollments. Just three years later in 2001, there were only 18 black freshmen at Swarthmore, a decline of 58 percent. The decline occurred at the time that Swarthmore dropped intercollegiate college football. Now Swarthmore reports that once again there are 43 blacks in this year’s entering class. As was the case eight years ago, black students make up 11.6 percent of all freshmen at Swarthmore. In 2004, for the first time in the history of our survey, Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia had the highest percentage of black freshmen of any of the nation’s highest-ranked liberal arts colleges. There were 30 black freshmen at Haverford in 2004 and they made up 9.1 percent of the entering class. Both the number of black freshmen and the black percentage of all freshmen at Haverford were at all-time highs. But this year Haverford College did even better. Blacks are more than 10 percent of the first-year class. The number of black freshmen improved 45 percent, from 22 in 2005 to 32 this year. Michael J. Keaton, associate director of admissions at Haverford College, told JBHE, “We have made an effort to build relationships with community-based organizations such as Prep for Prep, ABC, Teak Fellowship, and Philly Futures that work with talented black students.” He also credits Haverford’s success in improving black enrollments to three multicultural weekend events held on campus. Two are held in the fall for prospective students and a third is held in April for students who have been accepted but have not yet decided to enroll. Amherst College, last year’s leader, posted a small increase in black students this fall. But because of more substantial progress at Swarthmore and Haverford, Amherst dropped to third place in this year’s survey. Williams College and Pomona College are the only other nationally ranked liberal arts colleges at which black first-year enrollments exceed 8 percent of the freshman class. Seven of the high-ranking liberal arts colleges have first-year classes that are less than 4 percent black. They are Middlebury College, Colby College, Bowdoin College, Bucknell University, Scripps College, Bates College, and Harvey Mudd College. It should be noted that despite the small percentage of blacks in the entering class at Colby College, the number of entering black students at Colby College doubled from a year ago.
Short-Term Gainers and Losers Now we turn to a comparison of this year’s results with the data from last year. For the 22 colleges for which we have data, 15 colleges have posted gains in black enrollments while only five have fewer black freshmen than a year ago. Grinnell College and Middlebury College have the same number of black freshmen as they had a year ago. In addition to the doubling of black students at Colby College, there were large increases in black first-year students at Colgate University, Swarthmore College, Haverford College, Macalester College, and Smith College. At Colgate the number of black first-year students nearly doubled. Kate Susan Levine, assistant dean of admissions at Colgate, told JBHE that the college didn’t do anything different than it has done in the past. Rather, “time and experience has taught us to do what we do better.” It must be pointed out that 15 of the 50 entering black students at Colgate, or 30 percent, are varsity athletes. The largest drops in black enrollments this year occurred at Bowdoin College, Carleton College, Wesleyan University, and Vassar College.
Black Acceptance Rates at Liberal Arts Colleges JBHE has found that the liberal arts colleges tend to be more forthcoming than the large universities in releasing data on racial differences in black and white student acceptance rates. This year we have acceptance rate data for all but one of the 30 high-ranking liberal arts colleges that responded to our survey. Only Williams College declined to release information on its black student acceptance rate. At 18 of these 30 high-ranking liberal arts colleges the black acceptance rate was higher than the acceptance rate for all students. In some cases the differences were huge. For example, at Middlebury College 52.6 percent of black applicants were admitted compared to 21.9 percent of all applicants. At Amherst the black acceptance rate of 48.3 percent is more than double the rate for all students. At Smith, Grinnell, Davidson, Mount Holyoke, Scripps, Bucknell, Bryn Mawr, Macalester, Barnard, Washington and Lee, and Colgate, the black student acceptance rate was below the rate prevailing for all students. The highest black student yield in our survey belongs to Bryn Mawr College. Forty percent of all accepted black students decided to enroll. Colgate University had the second-highest black student yield among the nationally ranked liberal arts colleges. Pomona College ranked third in black student yield. The lowest black student yield among the high-ranking liberal arts colleges was at Scripps College. Only 17.2 percent of the black students who were accepted at Scripps College decided to enroll. Bates, Harvey Mudd, Bowdoin, Mount Holyoke, Macalester, Claremont McKenna, and Trinity had student yields below 25 percent. |
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CalTech and MIT are the nation’s two most prestigious universities where the main academic focus is on the various fields of science and technology. In academic rankings, CalTech and MIT are tied in fourth place among all national universities in the latest U.S. News & World Report survey. Only Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford receive higher rankings than these two institutes of technology.