HOME / chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Counting Black FreshmenA crude but telling measure of racial progress.

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Oct. 21, 2002, at 5:59 PM ET

Here's a fact that won't be discussed much between now and Election Day: The current freshman class at the California Institute of Technology contains only three black students. This isn't quite as shocking as it sounds; though very prestigious (the faculty includes four Nobel laureates), Caltech has a very small undergraduate student body. Its freshman class consists of a mere 260 people. Still, three out of 260 comes to 1.2 percent, which is shocking enough, particularly when you consider that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (whose faculty includes 10 Nobel laureates) has a freshman class that's 6.2 percent black. That's about half the percentage of African-Americans in the U.S. population. Apparently there were a couple of years during the past decade when the percentage of blacks in Caltech's freshman class was zero. (Chatterbox gleans these facts from a new survey in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.)

RSS

Nowadays it's considered terribly old-fashioned to assess racial progress by numerical means, but Chatterbox doesn't really see how else to do it. It can't be good news, for instance, that the University of California at Berkeley has only 142 black freshmen this year, constituting 3.9 percent of the total. That's about half as many blacks as Berkeley had before California's Proposition 209, which banned "preferential treatment" based on race, took effect during the 1998-99 school year. Affirmative action critics often complain when colleges accept a higher proportion of black applicants than of all applicants; it's taken as a sign that standards are being lowered. But why don't they complain now that Berkeley and UCLA, the two most prestigious universities in the University of California system, accept a lower proportion of black applicants than of all applicants?

Another interesting finding in the Journal's survey is that Harvard, which prides itself on maintaining the country's highest acceptance "yield"—i.e., getting the largest proportion of applicants whom it accepts to enroll—no longer maintains the country's highest black acceptance yield. Stanford does, with 64.4 percent, compared to Harvard's 61.2 percent. A decently high 6.8 percent of Harvard's freshman class is black, but that's down from 9 percent in 1993. According to an Oct. 21 article by Kate Rakoczy in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's black acceptance yield has been heading south since the mid-1990s. This would tend to minimize the impact of Harvard President Lawrence Summers' much-publicized run-in last year with Cornel West. (It's also worth noting that Princeton, the university that West decamped to, had a sharper drop than Harvard this year in black freshman enrollment, though the percentage of blacks in its freshman class, 8.4 percent, remains higher than Harvard's. Yale, which this year saw an increase in black freshman enrollment, now stands at 8.5 percent, the highest in the Ivy League.) On the other hand, the Crimson reports that the topic of West did come up with some frequency last year in discussions with prospective black students, so it probably had some impact.

The arrested progress of black enrollment at some of the country's most prestigious colleges is a crude measure of integration. And it should be noted that black enrollment is rising at other prestigious colleges: Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Washington University, and Stanford all saw an increase of more than 10 percent this year in their black freshman enrollment. Still, shouldn't all the top colleges in the U.S. be seeing increases in black enrollment, or at least an absence of decline? After all, these are the ones that should have the easiest time increasing black enrollment, both because they have the most cash to give out in financial aid and because they have the most glamour. If Harvard's having difficulty integrating, it's worth taking a moment to worry about racial progress in less pampered corners of American society.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

As disheartening as the numbers are, readers offer several possible explanations for the declines in African American enrollment. Down at the bottom of these posts, cb's joke about the UC Bearcats is funny, but it is not quite accurate. See this recent story in the Cincinnati Post for more figures.

Remarks From The Fray:

Ahem.

Before you go implying that CalTech is racist or anti-black, I suggest that you read a little further down the JBHE article.

Yes, it's true that there were only 3 blacks in the freshman class, but, of the 44 black applicants, CalTech accepted 13 of them, which is 29.5%. Compare this with the acceptance/application rate of 21.4% (560 accepted out of 2612 applicants).

If there were only three black freshman at CalTech, it was only because the 10 others that were accepted chose not to go.

-- DadofDavid

(To reply, click here.)

I attended Caltech. I can tell you that a lot of us worried over our lack of racial diversity. (Well, lack of non-Asian racial diversity.) The problem, as I understood it, was that virtually no black students applied.

We were as sensitive to the problem as anyone, but what could we do when we had no pool of applicants?

I'd have to guess that the problem starts long before we get to Caltech--in the public schools and the culture at large. If our society is producing too few black science students, then we need to attack the problem in the high schools, and in the grade schools, and in the homes.

I can tell you that the lack of diversity actually had one positive effect. When we looked at the two or three black students in any given class, it was very apparent that they were not there as the result of a quota. The few black students I observed were at the absolute top of the class. Some people may enter college with a lower opinion of minorities, thinking that they got a free ride into college, but anybody at Tech who opened their eyes was disabused of that notion in a hurry.

-- Scylla

(To reply, click here.)

There are several possible reasons that top schools are seeing a decline in enrollment:

CalTech might never have very many blacks because the small size of CalTech ensures that there will never be a "critical mass" of black students in the student body that will allow black students to feel comfortable there. Even if the percentage of blacks at CalTech shot up to 5%, that would be only 13 black students. It means probably never dating a black classmate, possibly never having another black person in your major, having maybe only 1 or 2 other blacks in your same dorm, if any, etc.

Why are Harvard's and Princeton's black enrollments declining? Harvard, contrary to Chatterbox's statements, actually does not provide the best financial aid package -- there are no merit scholarships, and Havard's "sticker price" tution has shot through the roof over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, Stanford, Johns Hopkins or CMU might be better able to provide "incentive" financial aid packages to attract students it wants, especially if the applicant uses Harvard's competing financial aid package as negotiating leverage.

Chatterbox failed to mention that while black enrollment at UC Berkeley has declined, Berkeley and UCLA are top in black enrollment in the UC System next to UC Riverside, which has both top black enrollment and has seen a marked increase in blacks in the student body since prop 209.

-- Dean

(To reply, click here.)

3 freshman blacks at Cal Tech. If those three graduate...and they will, that will be more blacks with a degree than the Cincinnati basketball team has graduated in the past 7 years-or more.

--cb

(To reply, click here.)

(10/22)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES