Some Colleges and Universities Do Better Than Others in Graduating African-American Students

One of the problems with using averages to understand the state of higher education is that the patterns they show gain an air of inevitability. This is especially true when those patterns conform to our sense of how things are or should be.

So when we see data suggesting that the average graduation rate for black students in four-year colleges and universities is about 20 points below that of their white peers, we are hardly surprised. The average black student, we know, leaves high school with a weaker academic record than the average white graduate, so where’s the mystery? Until somebody fi xes the high school problem, there’s not much colleges and universities can do.

Or is there?

For the past several months, we’ve been digging beneath the averages and looking at data from individual institutions in our College Results Online database.

We’ve found that some institutions have horrendous graduation-rate gaps between white and black students—well above the national average. And it turns out that other institutions have no gaps at all. Indeed, in dozens of colleges, black students graduate at rates equal to or higher than their white counterparts. In other words, it’s not entirely about preparation, and wide gaps in the graduation rates of white and black students are not inevitable.

Our analysis strongly suggests that what colleges do with and for the students they admit matters a great deal.

THE GAP IN BLACK AND WHITE

Nationally, African-American students earn bachelor’s degrees from four-year institutions at rates 20 percentage points below those of their white peers. In this analysis, we exclude for-profi t institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities and concentrate on the 293 public and 163 private nonprofi t colleges that have suffi cient numbers of students of both races to calculate reliable gaps.

The graduation rate for African-American students in the private colleges and universities in our analysis is 54.7 percent, compared with 73.4 percent for whites—an 18.7 percentage-point gap.2 Similarly, at public institutions, only 43.3 percent of African-American students graduate within six years, compared with 59.5 percent of whites—a 16.2 percentage-point gap.

Download FULL TEXT IN PDF FORMAT: CRO Brief-AfricanAmerican.pdf Publication date: August 9 2010

www.edtrust.org 1250 H Street, N.W., Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20005 Tel: 202/293-1217 Fax: 202/293-2605