More than 50 schools have also reduced graduation gaps between black and white students, including Texas Tech University and Ohio State University. “These institutions illustrate that demographics aren’t destiny and that what colleges do with and for their students plays a pivotal role in student success,” write the authors.
At Ohio State, where the black graduation rate has climbed from about 42 percent in 2003 to around 73 percent in 2013, the gap between white and black students has shrunk by more than 8 points. In other words, white and black students are graduating at higher rates than they used to, but blacks have made gains at a faster pace.
As the report outlines, the school connects with low-income, first-generation potential students, most of them black, when they are in middle school through the Young Scholars Program, which points them toward the classes and study habits they will need to succeed in college. If they enroll at Ohio State, they get an annual scholarship, attend a summer bridge program and a study-skills course to ease the transition to school, and meet with coaches and mentors regularly. There are off-campus weekend retreats, conversations about race on campus, and a research center that brings black students from around the country to campus to share best practices and challenges.
Texas Tech created a program called Mentor Tech, which focuses on connecting students of color with faculty and local churches and community groups. “The mentors we match them with commit to assisting them with navigating the system, sharing the unwritten rules of culture, connecting them with resources, being that listening ear, being that caring arm, and sometimes being that voice of correction to help them bounce back from failure,” Cory Powell, the director of the program, told Education Trust. The graduation rate for black students on campus is 19 points higher at 56 percent than it was 10 years ago.
Many schools, Education Trust suggests, have a long way to go when it comes to helping black students graduate from college. Black students are often more challenged by serious disadvantages from their earliest years, and colleges are being asked to close gaps that they did not directly create. Black students are more likely than white students to attend highly segregated schools where poverty is the norm, for instance, and are less likely to have access to advanced placement courses. As Anthony Carnevale, the head of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told The Atlantic at a recent roundtable, “We still have separate but unequal education among the races.” But that doesn’t change the fact that 73 of the colleges that had rising graduation rates in general had stagnant or declining graduation rates for black students specifically. Nearly 30 of the schools saw declining graduation rates for black students.
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