The Top 100: Interpreting The Data

Does a 5 percent annual percentage increase seem like a healthy rate of growth? At this rate, after 10 years a $100 investment yields a $63 profit. What if we are talking about people, and specifically, the number of students of color receiving bachelor’s degrees in a year? In academic year 1994-1995, just over 200,000 students representing ethnic and racial minority groups graduated from U.S. colleges and universities with a four-year degree. In 2004-2005, that number reached nearly 350,000, representing an annual percentage growth rate of 5.1 percent and a 64 percent increase over the entire 10-year period. The growth rate was fastest for Hispanics, where the 6.4 percent clip led to a near doubling of degrees from, 54,000 in 1994-1995 to just over 100,000 in 2004-2005. These growth rates are especially impressive when compared with the rate of growth in bachelor’s degrees conferred to White students, which increased an average of 1.3 percent annually during this same time frame.

The trends are impressive. The number of degrees conferred to minorities continue to grow and the gap in attainment between White students and students of color continues to diminish. But the gap has not disappeared. In this year’s, Top 100 analyses, the first to come under the Diverse: Issues In Higher Education banner, we continue our focus on the institutions that award the most degrees to students of color. This edition focuses on bachelor’s degree recipients, and we will examine the graduate degree recipients in July. The Top 100 analyses continue to feature degree production among the four racial/ethnic minority groups — African-Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics and American Indians — identified within the national data collection system that we employ.

Source of Data & Methodology
The current analysis reports on degrees conferred during the 2004-2005 academic year. As in past years, this is not a “final release” from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The preliminary data are complete and accurate for those institutions included in the analysis, which, in our experience, represents the vast majority of U.S. community colleges, four-year colleges and universities. There is one notable and unfortunate exception. The National Center for Education Statistics granted institutions in the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast region a reprieve from reporting, as our friends and colleagues there were engaged in the clean-up and rebuilding effort after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.