Only 41 percent of Black students who start college as first-time, full-time freshmen complete a bachelor’s degree in 6 years, a rate 22 percentage points below their White peers. The Education Trust explored this disparity in a new report identifying institutions that are succeeding — or not succeeding — in graduating Black students.
According to Dr. Andrew H. Nichols, Ed Trust’s director of higher education research and data analytics, closing the graduation gap will require three systemic changes. Institutions must work to close existing gaps among Black and White students, change broader enrollment patterns so that selective institutions are enrolling more Black students, and less selective institutions must work to improve their graduation rates.
“We cannot close the graduation gap just by closing gaps at the institutional level,” Nichols said. Nichols authored the report along with Denzel Evans-Bell, Ed Trust higher education research analyst.
Black students are more likely to attend less selective institutions, a trend that Nichols attributes to “undermatching,” in which students choose to attend institutions for which they are academically overqualified. Only 6 percent of the students attending the most selective of the 676 majority White institutions that Ed Trust surveyed are Black, Nichols said. Poor academic preparation in the K-12 system is another culprit, he said.
“Black children simply aren’t afforded the same opportunities that their white peers are,” Nichols said. “They go to schools with fewer resources, and they don’t have the same kind of access to curricular options. So this prevents them from developing the type of academic profile they would need to be attractive to a lot of these selective institutions.”
While the graduation gap weighs heavily in favor of White students, some of the 676 schools profiled are actually graduating Black students at a higher rate than white students. Rutgers University-Newark, Florida State University, and East Carolina University all graduate Black students a t a higher rate than their White peers.
Berea College is another school that does well with respect to its Black student graduation rates, which are slightly higher than the graduation rate of White students. The college is unique in many respects: it was founded in 1855 by abolitionists and was the first school in the south to be open to both Black and White students. Berea charges no tuition and enrolls a high percentage of first-generation and Pell eligible students. Approximately 20 percent of incoming freshmen are Black.
