Since the early 1980s, the American Council on Education (ACE) has been collecting and disseminating educational data annually on racial and ethnic minorities.Among its findings in 1996 is that students of color have posted significant gains in college enrollment and the number of degrees they earned — yet the picture is decidedly mixed for different racial and ethnic minority groups.
One thing is certain — say the report’s coauthors Deborah J. Carter, associate director of ACE’s Office of Minorities in Higher Education and Senior Scholar Dr. Reginald Wilson — the academic gains were largely bolstered by the success of minority women. But in no racial or ethnic group is the gap as glaring as it is between African-American men and African-American women in the number of degrees earned at each of the three degree levels, maintain Carter and Wilson.
In earlier years, ACE studies have made note of the gender-different degree rates among African Americans. Dr. William Trent, an expert on the impact of race and equity issues on educational attainment, sounded an alarm in the 1991 book, “College in Black and White,” when he concluded that special attention needed to be focused on the academic careers of Black males and that gender-different degree rates must be monitored.
