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The police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed have prompted much soul searching and re-examination of racial attitudes and policies everywhere from family dinner tables to corporate boardrooms to the halls of Congress—and, maybe someday, the White House.
These discussions have taken place on college campuses for years, but many American colleges and universities have made little progress in achieving true diversity and inclusion in their own student bodies.
Highly selective colleges, epitomized by the Ivy League, have seen black enrollment stagnate, and increasingly they have admitted the sons and daughters of voluntary black immigrants to the U.S. rather than descendants of enslaved blacks forcibly brought to America’s shores. Those elite colleges also admit black students disproportionately from similarly elite private schools rather than the average or underperforming public high schools students of color often attend.
These were some of the findings in a revelatory, sometimes explosive book by education writer Paul Tough, author of “How Children Succeed,” a staple on many professional parents’ bookshelves. His new book, “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,” mixes cutting-edge research with deeply moving personal stories of students from unimaginably disadvantaged backgrounds trying to “crack the code” of getting into college and succeeding once they’re there.
The chapter “Fitting in” addresses the issues of race and class head on. Tough weaves together the experiences of a young African-American woman from Charlotte, N.C. at Princeton with academic research to tell the story of a promise that remains unfulfilled.
By the numbers
That lack of fulfillment can be quantified: 8%, the percentage of black students at Ivy League and other highly selective colleges and universities. “The numbers really are startlingly consistent,” Tough writes. “About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black,…but Princeton’s student body is 8 percent black. Cornell’s is 8 percent black.”
Other Ivy League schools and “Ivy-Plus” elite universities are pretty close. Back in 1984, Harvard’s freshman class was—wait for it—8% black.
According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s entering classes hovered at around 10%-11% black or African-American for years, but the university reports that more than 14% of the Classes of 2023 and 2024 identified as black or African-American. African-Americans comprised only 6.7% of Cornell’s Class of 2023, while another 5.6% described themselves as bi- or multiracial. Neither school responded to an emailed request for comment by deadline.
Even at Stony Brook University, a state university that I called one of the U.S.’s top 10 engines of upward mobility, blacks comprise only around 10% of undergraduate enrollment.
“It is unlikely,” Tough concludes, that elite colleges “will increase the number of black students they admit anytime soon.”
And the black students that elite colleges do admit increasingly come from either mixed-race backgrounds or immigrant families from Africa or the Caribbean. This was noted as far back as 2003 by prominent African-American scholars Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Only between 9% and 13% of black American 18- and 19-year-olds are immigrants or come from immigrant families. But one long-term study cited by Tough shows that at “highly selective private colleges,…students from black immigrant families plus students with one black and nonblack parent [rose] from about 40 percent of black students in the 1980s…to about 60 percent in the late 1990s.” (Of course, many black Caribbean immigrants are descendants of people enslaved in Caribbean countries.)
‘Privileged Poor’ vs. ‘Doubly Disadvantaged’
What’s more, the Ivies and other elite colleges disproportionately tap an even narrower niche for the black students it admits: elite private day and boarding schools like Phillips Exeter, Harvard Westlake, and Trinity. These students often come from poor or blue-collar communities and attend private school on scholarship. Great programs like Prep for Prep in New York City identify talented students of color early and prepare them to excel at private schools that were among the original bastions of white privilege. But Prep for Prep only accepts about 200 students a year.
In a 2019 book that summed up his research, Anthony Jack, a Harvard professor, called these students “The Privileged Poor,” while he labeled low-income students of color who attended often underperforming public high schools the “Doubly Disadvantaged.” Jack found that the “tiny fraction” of low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools “produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges.”
Why? Because, Jack believes, it lets colleges ‘‘hedge their bets on diversity.” Adds Tough: “Graduates of Choate or Andover are a known quantity in Ivy League admissions offices, [so] if you can fulfill your college’s aspiration to achieve a certain amount of visible diversity without having to depart from your usual schedule of prep-school visits, that makes your job easier.”
Changing this will be very difficult. Too many public schools that serve poor black communities are de facto segregated or outright failing, while poverty is the biggest barrier to academic achievement. Systemic racism and unequal access to resources have taken a brutal toll. Elite colleges know that the Privileged Poor adapt much easier to the rigors and intense competition of academic life.
Some programs have succeeded at helping low-income students of color once they get into college. Philip Uri Treisman, a math professor and executive director of the Charles A. Dana Center for Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Texas, Austin, specializes on working with minority kids from underperforming high schools and getting them to master college calculus. Treisman plays a starring role in a particularly inspiring chapter of Tough’s book, in which he claims to have taught more than 100 Latino UT students who went on to get Ph.Ds in math. (Earlier he pioneered a similar program aimed at black students at the University of California, Berkeley.) He won a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1992 for his work, which has been replicated across the country.
Elite colleges and universities are not obligated to take students they think might not succeed. But if they want to live up to their ideals, then they, like all of us, are obligated to try a lot harder.
Howard R. Gold is a MarketWatch columnist. No-Nonsense College appears monthly. Follow him on Twitter @howardrgold.
