Black First-Year Students at the Nation’s Leading Research Universities

Once more, this year The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has completed its survey of admissions offices at the nation’s highest-ranked research universities. For the 19th consecutive year, they have calculated and compared the percentages of African-American students in this fall’s entering freshman classes.

Four years ago Columbia University headed the JBHE rankings for the first time. Now, for the fifth year in a row, Columbia has the highest percentage of Black freshman students among the 30 highest-ranking universities in the nation. There are 174 Black freshmen at Columbia this fall. They make up 12.5 percent of the incoming class.

In terms of numbers of black freshman, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has led our survey six times. In 2011, there are 432 Black freshmen at Chapel Hill making up 10.7 percent of the first-year class. This places the university in third place, percentage wise.

It is well recognized that the percentage of Black applicants who actually receive invitations to join the freshman class is a valuable gauge of an institution’s commitment to racial diversity. Yet this figure is regarded as the most sensitive of all admissions data. This is particularly true for some of the very highest ranked institutions.

Of the 29 highest-ranked universities that responded to our survey, 11 declined to reveal their Black acceptance rates. Unquestionably, public and private litigation threats to affirmative action policies in college admissions have been a factor in producing this sensitivity. With this in mind, admissions officers — who on the whole are solidly supportive of affirmative action — have apprehensions when statistics on Black admissions are made available to the public. There are standard concerns too that racial conservatives on faculties and among alumni and trustees may interpret the figures as suggesting a so-called dumbing down of academic standards and a favoring of “unqualified” Blacks over perhaps more qualified Whites.

But, at the same time it is critical to keep in mind that an institution’s high Black acceptance rate often indicates nothing more than the fact that the admissions office of a given institution has a very strong and well-qualified Black applicant pool.