Good News on African Americans in Higher Education

Don’t be discouraged by recent setbacks in measures to advance African-American higher education. There has been important progress on many fronts.

• A new report from the U.S. Department of Education states that in 2007, the latest year for which complete data is available, there were 2.2 million black students enrolled in higher education in the United States. This is the highest level of enrollments for African Americans in history.
• Blacks now make up 13.1 percent of all students enrolled in higher education in the United States. Measured by percentage of population, blacks have now reached parity with whites.
• In 2007, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were more than 230,000 African Americans enrolled in degree-granting graduate schools. This is an all-time high. In 1990 there were 84,000 African Americans enrolled in graduate school, barely more than a third of black enrollments today.
• Older blacks are more likely than older whites to be enrolled in college. According to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, 12 percent of the black population in the 25 to 35 age group were enrolled in higher education. In contrast, only 9.8 percent of all whites in this age group were enrolled in higher education.
• The Department of Education reports that there are nearly 1.8 million African Americans enrolled in postsecondary career and technical education programs. Blacks make up 16.6 percent of all students enrolled in these programs.
• Harvard University calls the Class of 2013, which will matriculate this coming fall, the most racially diverse in its history. Most notable is the fact that 10 percent of the incoming class is African American. Black student yield was 71 percent in 2009, up from 64 percent a year ago.
• This fall Carnegie Mellon, the highly selective university in Pittsburgh, will have the largest number of incoming black students in its history. Preliminary figures show that there will be 105 black freshmen at Carnegie Mellon this fall, up from 79 a year ago. In 2008 blacks made up 5.3 percent of the entering class. This year, blacks will be 7.4 percent of the freshman class.
• At the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, at best, 10,000 American blacks — one in 1,000 — were college educated. There are more than 4.5 million African Americans alive today who hold a four-year college degree.
• 33.6%. That's the reported percent increase, between the fall semesters of 2009 and 2010, in the number of black and African-American students entering math and computer science graduate programs.