The long, winding, and neglected road - Black students do not reality education parity in Southern state college and universities

Black Issues in Higher Education, Sept 17, 1998 by Jamilah Evelyn

SEF report reveals that after thirty years of Black progress along the path to higher education parity, there are still `Miles To Go'

Washington -- More than two decades of hard-fought desegregation efforts have yielded few results and left Black students in the South with meager gains in access to the public four-year schools.

So reported the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) late last month, also revealing other bleak statistics in their latest study, Miles To Go, that assesses higher education in the nineteen states that once operated racially separate college systems.

The percentage of Blacks going to the public institutions, the foundation found, has barely budged. Black students account for 15 percent of first time, full-time freshmen undergraduates at public four-year institutions in 1976, and 17 percent in 1996.

"It's not a popular issue in the South, not because people are walking around as pointy-headed racists anymore, but because they'd rather ignore it and hope it will go away," said Robert Kronley, the study's author and head of the foundation's program on educational opportunity and postsecondary desegregation. "But the evidence shows that we're not going to be able to close our eyes and will these problems away."

Widely received in the higher education community, the report noted Black students at public institutions in the South remain largely at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and are scarcely represented in the state flagship institutions.

Only 12.1 percent of the Blacks entering public institutions of higher education in the nineteen states in 1996 went to traditionally White schools, the study found. As a result, Blacks accounted for only 8.6 percent of the freshmen attending flagship state universities across the South.

Nine of the states in the study reported that the percentage of Blacks in their freshman classes in fact declined between 1991 and 1996.

The study also revealed that Blacks are more likely than Whites to leave college without degrees. While 14.7 of freshmen at the South's four-year institutions in 1988 were Black, only 9.8 percent of those who received a degree within six years were Black.

And the percentage of Blacks among students earning doctoral degrees climbed less than a percentage point in two decades, from 3.8 percent in 1976-77 to 4.3 percent in 1994-95. Among those Blacks who earn doctoral degrees, almost half are concentrated in the field of education.

How Did This Happen?

The study points to several reasons the public flagship institutions -- considered to have stronger academic programs, greater professional networks, and more credentialed faculty than community colleges and HBCUs -- have been all but inaccessible for African American students.

Kronley said that conflicting court decisions over the use of race in college admissions and the current political battle over affirmative action have given some state officials excuses to slow or eliminate race-based remedies.

The report also cites higher admissions standards at flagship schools and inefficient preparation in secondary schools as prime reasons why Black students simply aren't successful at gaining admission to public, four-year schools.

The South also was faulted for its high percentage of merit-based, as opposed to need-based, financial aid. The study found that on average, southern states distributed more than one-third of all their financial aid without consideration of need -- a whopping 10 times the percentage of aid being distributed on a non-need basis in the thirty-one other states. And in twelve of the nineteen states studied, at least 30 percent of all Black families had incomes under $10,000.

Additionally, the report found that Black faculty -- whom the authors describe as "essential for providing role models and mentoring" -- were concentrated mainly at community colleges and HBCUs. In Mississippi, 87 percent of Black faculty were at community or historically Black colleges. In North Carolina, that number was 80 percent. In Maryland, the number was 66 percent.

Hardly anyone concerned with the fate of minorities in higher education was surprised by the statistics exposed in the study.

"This is old news. It's almost like the Kerner report. It didn't say anything we didn't already know," said Dr. Roscoe Brown, who runs the center for urban educational policy at the City University of New York's graduate center.

Dr. James McLean, who ran the desegregation efforts in Virginia under then-Gov. Douglas Wilder, said the report's findings sound like "deja vu."

"In 1968, these same states were asked to develop plans to desegregate their systems and nothing happened until 1972," he said. "In 1972, all but two developed plans and those plans ranged from no plans to plans to plan."

Who's to Blame?

Many said the states -- which were federally mandated to desegregate their institution of higher learning as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Adams case of 1972 -- never showed any real level of commitment to parity.