Blacks reach milestone at Southern colleges

RALEIGH, N.C. – For the first time in the South, blacks are as well represented on college campuses as they are in the region’s population as a whole – something not yet true of the country overall.

The milestone is noted in a new fact book to be released today by the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit organization that promotes education.

In the 16 states measured, the number of blacks enrolled in colleges has risen by more than half over the last decade. They now make 21 percent of college students and 19 percent of the overall population.

The number represents progress, but it also has to be seen in context. A major contributing factor is the South’s rapidly growing Hispanic population, which has reduced the proportion of the population that is black and made the milestone easier to reach mathematically.

Educators also stressed that the number should not obscure the persistent achievements gaps affecting blacks both in the South and nationally. In particular, black enrollment rates for college-age students, while improving, still lag well behind those of whites, as do the graduation rates of black college students.

The latest report may not reflect precisely what many consider to be the South, because the 16 states it covers also include border states Kentucky, Delaware, West Virginia and Maryland.

Still, the report reflects the reality that many more Southern blacks are enrolling in college. In those states, about 1.1 million black students were enrolled in college in the fall of 2005, 52 percent more than a decade earlier.

The increase have come largely at new and expanding traditionally white, public universities and two-year colleges rather than at historically black colleges, which for many years shouldered nearly all the burden of higher education for Southern blacks. Many of those schools still exist, but their share of black enrollment in the region has slipped from 26 percent to 19 percent over the past decade.

Overall, blacks represent 31.4 percent of all Georgia college students, about 1 percent higher than the proportion in the overall population.

The number of Hispanics in higher education in the South has also shot up sharply over the past decade – by about 71 percent to about 552,000 in the region the board studied.

Nationally, 25 percent of Hispanics aged 18 to 24 attend college, compared with 33 percent of blacks and 44 percent of whites.