Sobering Statistics
Sixty-seven percent of Black male students who begin college never complete their degrees. Black men comprise only 4.3 percent of students enrolled at American colleges and universities, the exact same percentage as in 1976. These are staggering statistics, and Dr. Shaun Harper of the University of Pennsylvania is trying to make sense of the data he’s compiled in what is considered to be the largest-ever empirical study of Black male undergraduates.
With more than 200 Black men participating in his study, Harper’s subjects were enrolled in six different types of institutions, 42 in all. In “Seeking Out Success,” senior writer Ronald Roach reports that with all of Harper’s data he is writing both a 40-page report and a book, which Harper says should highlight strategies to combat the low Black male college enrollment and
completion rates.
In “Tackling the Black, Brown Male Crisis,” senior writer David Pluviose provides another angle on what higher ed is doing to engage Black and Hispanic male college students. The Student African American Brotherhood, also called Brother to Brother on some campuses, was founded by Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe on the campus of a four-year university, but he says community colleges are the fastest-growing segment of the
organization.
“Engagement, particularly at the two-year level, is a real important piece, particularly for young men of color who come into these two-year situations and don’t have a real sense of direction and guidance. They’ve done something good in their mind, and that is going to college, but they don’t have a plan to make college work,” Bledsoe says. And Bledsoe does not go about setting up SAAB chapters blindly. He visits interested campuses to do an environmental audit to assess whether these colleges and universities foster an environment that is hospitable and inviting to young minority men.
Shifting gears a bit, although still reporting on issues of access and equity, Diverse goes international as we report on India’s Supreme Court’s recent ruling on quotas in higher education for historically oppressed Indians. India’s public universities have reserved 27 percent of their seats for lower-caste and historically oppressed Indians, and the court upheld a stay against the quota system, a ruling that upper-caste Indians support and the lower-caste Indians consider a blow to educational equality. Read more about this battle between the have and have-nots in Jonathan Sidhu’s “A Tale of Two Indias.”
