Eliminating the Racial Gap in College Graduation Rates

Nationwide, the black student college graduation rate is nearly 20 percentage points below the rate for white students. But JBHE data shows that at some highly ranked institutions, the racial graduation rate gap has totally disappeared. For example, at Wellesley College, Pomona College, Smith College, and Wake Forest University, the black student graduation rate is actually higher than the rate for whites. At Harvard University, Vanderbilt University and Lafayette College, the racial gap is only one or two percentage points.

One reason for the small or nonexistent racial gap in college graduation rates at these schools is that highly selective colleges tend to admit only students who have a very high likelihood of success. Also, these colleges typically have large endowments which permits them to offer generous financial aid packages that tend to reduce college dropout rates. Studies have shown that more than two thirds of all black students who drop out of college do so for financial reasons.

A new report from the Washington-based research organization Education Trust finds that there are many colleges and universities that are not highly selective or particularly well-endowed which also have had great success in eliminating the black-white graduation rate gap.

Author of the report Kevin Carey, who is the research and policy manager at Education Trust, states that, “If there is a single factor that seems to distinguish colleges and universities that have truly made a difference on behalf of minority students, it is attention. Successful colleges pay attention to graduation rates. They monitor year-to-year change, study the impact of different interventions on student outcomes, break down the numbers among different student populations, and continuously ask themselves how they could improve.”