A generation ago, when there were more college-age students than there were desks in America's public and private colleges and universities, making sure that students stayed in school was hardly a priority. Even less exclusive institutions could be selective about which students they admitted and cavalier about those they lost.

Two things combined to change that situation. The first is the smaller cohort of college-age students. The second is the growing recognition that educational achievement can ameliorate the effects of past and present discrimination.

By the 1980s, programs designed to not just recruit students but to keep them through graduation had become common at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Today, programs in colleges and universities run the gamut from unadorned pre-college orientations to intensive coursework that doesn't pause until students have diplomas. Although many modern retention programs evolved from efforts that were originally designed to keep Black students in college, African American students are still behind in the struggle to stay in school.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which researchers say is the only organization that routinely monitors the graduation rates of individual institutions, reports that only 36 percent of Black students at public Division I colleges and universities had graduated after six years, compared with 56 percent of white students. At Division I independent schools, the graduation rates were at least 15 percentage points higher. However, the spread between the chances of graduation for Black and white students was still the same, at approximately 21 percent. (NCAA divisions are athletics-oriented groupings based on institutional populations. Division I schools, by and large, are the most-populated colleges and universities in the country.)