Report: A Look at Black Student Success

Posted by Education Trust on March 20, 2017

The White House acclaim for HBCUs comes in the same week as a study by The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, revealed that the nation’s HBCUs are doing a much better job than predominantly white schools in graduating low-income black students.

The study, entitled “A Look at Black Student Success,” concluded that at most of the nation’s four-year public and private colleges and universities, a significant gap exists between the graduation rates of black students and white students. At the 676 public and private nonprofit institutions included in The Education Trust survey (not including HBCUs), the six-year graduation rate for black students was 45.4 percent — 19.3 points lower than the 64.7 percent graduation rate for white students.

The authors of the report, Andrew H. Nichols and Denzel Evans-Bell, point out a major reason for the gap: Black freshmen are less likely to enroll at institutions where most freshmen graduate (the nation’s most selective schools) and more likely to enroll at institutions where few do.

Article: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/03/01/517770255/hbcus-graduate-more-poor-black-students-than-white-colleges

Report: https://edtrust.org/resource/blackstudentsuccess/