The Equity Task Force at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has defined concrete goals and plans to invest more than $75 million into the support of Black students and programs over the course of the next five years. Among the goals are to double the number of Black undergraduate students at the university.
At the University of Virginia, just 13 percent of undergraduates identified as Black or Hispanic; that share is 60 percent lower than the state’s population ages 18 to 24. The College of William & Mary and Christopher Newport University are near large Black population centers but each of their student bodies is just 7 percent Black.
Harvard College accepted 3.43 percent of applicants to the Class of 2025. Blacks or African Americans make up 18 percent of all admitted students.
New data from the National Science Foundation show that in pre-pandemic America enrollments in graduate programs in science, engineering, and health fields at U.S. academic institutions were increasing. The increase in Black enrollments in these disciplines increased faster than the rate for enrollments as a whole.
For non-Hispanic White high school graduates in 2019, 47.9 percent had enrolled in four-year colleges and universities by October of that year. For 2019 Black high school graduates, less than 32 percent had enrolled in four-year colleges and universities by the ensuing fall.
Black applicants to the flagship Berkeley campus are up by more than 35 percent from a year ago, while overall applicants to Berkley are up by 23.8 percent. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the number of Black applicants surged by nearly 37 percent.
Harvard University accepted 747 students who applied early from a pool of more than 10,000 early applicants. African Americans constitute 16.6 percent of those admitted early, compared to 12.7 percent last year.
In the fall of 2019, Blacks were more than 18 percent of total first-time enrollments in graduate programs in public administration but only 4.5 percent of first-time graduate enrollments in physical sciences and 5.8 percent in engineering.
The National Student Clearinghouse Center has released a preliminary report that shows that this fall Black enrollments in higher education are down by 6.3 percent compared to a year ago. But Black enrollments in graduate school are up by more than 8 percent.
The percentage of young White Americans with at least an associate’s degree is 19 percentage points higher than for young Black adults. Absent significant increases in graduation rates, declines in the number of Black students in college will make it hard to shrink their attainment gap relative to White students.
At a time when many colleges and universities are struggling to maintain enrollments at levels of the past several years, many historically Black colleges and universities are seeing increases in enrollments with some schools achieving all-time records.
This fall there are 12,754 students enrolled at North Carolina A&T State University, continuing a growth trend that began in 2013, when it became the largest HBCU in the nation. It has held that status now for seven consecutive years.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges and universities are struggling to maintain enrollments at levels that existed a year or two ago. But Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black educational institution in North Carolina is bucking the trend.
In the fall of 2018, there were 291,767 students enrolled at the nation’s HBCUs. African Americans made up about 76.5 percent of the enrollments at HBCUs that year. This fall, undoubtedly many HBCUs will struggle to maintain enrollments due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an ear, when selective colleges and universities typically hold their admissions statistics for Black student close to their vests, a few have announced how many Black students were admitted to the Class of 2024.
Idaho governor Brad Little has signed into law a bill that prohibits the consideration of race in hiring and admissions decisions at state-operated colleges and universities in the state. Idaho becomes the ninth state to ban race-sensitive admissions at state colleges and universities.
There are currently 56 African Americans (6.2 percent) in the latest 900-member class at Harvard Business School. At the present time, only two of the 100 tenured faculty members are Black.
If we look only at those students who graduated from high school in the spring of 2018, we find that 64.1 percent of Black students had enrolled in postsecondary education by October 2018. For 2018 non-Hispanic White high school graduates, the college participation rate was 71.3 percent.
Black students make up at least 11 percent of total enrollments at all five Ivy League law schools. Leading the group is Columbia University in New York where there are 39 Black students out of a total enrollment of 124. Thus, Blacks are 31.2 percent of the total enrollments.
In October 2018, there were 715,000 African American first-year students in all undergraduate institutions, 638,000 African Americans in their second year, 552,000 in their third year and 389,000 African Americans in their fourth year of college.
The Institute for International Education reports that in the 2018-19 academic year, there were 40,290 students from sub-Saharan Africa enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States. They made up 3.7 percent of the 1,095,299 foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities that year.
If we look at total enrollments in U.S. graduate schools, we find that in 2018, there were 1,869,845 students. Of these, 190,224, or 10.2 percent were African Americans. Women made up 69.5 percent of all African American graduate school enrollments.
Three years ago, there was a major increase in the number of Black students admitted to the nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California. Since that time progress has stagnated.
Recently, most of the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities informed applicants if they had been accepted for admission into the Class of 2023. Some revealed the racial/ethnic breakdown of their admitted students.
In 2016, Virginia Tech President Tim Sands set a goal to have 40 percent of the student body come from underrepresented groups and first generation students by 2022.
Most of the information is contained in other federal reports, but the 228-page report is useful as it collects data on African American educational attainment at all levels in one place.
The number of African-American students enrolled at public colleges and universities in Illinois has fallen nearly 25.9 percent during the five-year period from 2013 to 2017. In contrast, enrollments are up for all other underrepresented groups.
A new survey from the Pew Research Center has found that 73 percent of Americans believe that colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making admissions decisions. Only 7 percent say race should be a major factor in admissions and 19 percent say it should be a minor factor.
In October 2017, there were 719,000 African American first-year students, 664,000 African Americans in their second year, 608,000 in their third year and 324,000 African Americans in their fourth year of college.
This academic year, 1,540 Black students enrolled at a U.S. medical school. They made up 7.1 percent of all medical school matriculants. The number of Black students enrolling in medical schools is up 14 percent from the 2015-16 academic year. Women were nearly 61 percent of all Black medical school matriculants.
The 2018 entering class includes 866 new first-year students and 71 new transfer students, making it the largest entering class since 2010. Total enrollment for Xavier University is now 3,231 students, which is the highest overall enrollment since 2011.
There were 20,135,159 students enrolled at Title IV institutions in the fall of 2017. Of these, there were 2,489,088 African Americans in this group. They made up 12.4 percent of the total enrollments. Blacks were 11.4 percent of the total enrollments in graduate programs.
In 2017, there were 188,838 Black students enrolled in graduate schools in the United States. They made up 12.6 percent of all enrollments. There were 56,765 Black men and 130,006 Black women enrolled in graduate school.
Historically Black colleges and universities all over the nation are seeing increases in enrollments. Here are some examples.
The United Negro College Fund’s (UNCF) Empower Me Tour is a traveling college-and-career-readiness roadshow that aims to inform students about educational opportunities at UNCF member institutions. Last year alone, nearly $4 million in scholarships were awarded by UNCF-member institutions during the tour.
A total of 3,452 Black students were admitted to at least one of the nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California. This is 15 fewer than last year. The number of Black admits was down at six of the nine campuses.
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