The numbers of African Americans earning graduate degrees at American colleges and universities from 1991 to 1995 increased at rates more than double the general graduate student population.
Particularly noteworthy were the gains of African Americans earning masters degrees. From 1991 to 1995, the annual average percent increase was 9.6 percent for African Americans earning master's degrees compared to a 4 percent annual average increase for all students.
Other minority groups experienced similar growth rates in students earning graduate degrees. Between 1991 and 1995 Asian Americans and Hispanics both had a 9.5 percent annual average increase in earning master's degrees; anti Native Americans posted a 8 percent annual average increase during the same period.
Education experts attribute the impressive growth figures largely to efforts by universities to recruit and retain minorities at graduate programs during the 1980s and early 1990s.
"What you see is the result of many years of work," Dr. Anne Pruitt, a scholar-in-residence at the Washington, D.C.-based Council of Graduate Schools, said of minority outreach and retention program development at the nation's graduate and professional schools.
Pruitt, who has served as an associate dean at Ohio State University, noted that during the 1980s the development of mentoring initiatives, special research and fellowship programs, and other retention programs helped bring about a more favorable climate at many campuses for minority graduate and professional students.
The optimistic assessment of minority progress in graduate and professional education is clouded, however, by the recent setbacks to affirmative action programs in Texas and California, according to many observers.
"I worry the anti-affirmative action developments here in California will have a chilling effect on the numbers of Black students enrolling and earning degrees at the graduate level," said Dr. Walter Allen, a UCLA sociologist who has studied African American participation in American higher education extensively.
