SEF report reveals that after thirty years of Black progress along the path to higher education parity, there are still `Miles To Go'

Washington -- More than two decades of hard-fought desegregation efforts have yielded few results and left Black students in the South with meager gains in access to the public four-year schools.

So reported the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) late last month, also revealing other bleak statistics in their latest study, Miles To Go, that assesses higher education in the nineteen states that once operated racially separate college systems.

The percentage of Blacks going to the public institutions, the foundation found, has barely budged. Black students account for 15 percent of first time, full-time freshmen undergraduates at public four-year institutions in 1976, and 17 percent in 1996.

"It's not a popular issue in the South, not because people are walking around as pointy-headed racists anymore, but because they'd rather ignore it and hope it will go away," said Robert Kronley, the study's author and head of the foundation's program on educational opportunity and postsecondary desegregation. "But the evidence shows that we're not going to be able to close our eyes and will these problems away."

Widely received in the higher education community, the report noted Black students at public institutions in the South remain largely at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and are scarcely represented in the state flagship institutions.

Only 12.1 percent of the Blacks entering public institutions of higher education in the nineteen states in 1996 went to traditionally White schools, the study found. As a result, Blacks accounted for only 8.6 percent of the freshmen attending flagship state universities across the South.

Nine of the states in the study reported that the percentage of Blacks in their freshman classes in fact declined between 1991 and 1996.