A new college ranking, designed to help students and their parents evaluate an institution's academic and social appeal for African Americans, hits newsstands.

WASHINGTON
A new list ranking the nation's "Top 50" colleges for African American students is attracting attention from list-leary academics and rekindling debate over the merits of ratings.

The list, featured in this month's Black Enterprise magazine, could influence the decisions made by more than 500,000 African American freshmen who will start college next year.

Published by Black Enterprise magazine and DayStar Research, the list ranked Spelman College and Morehouse College first and second respectively. Another Atlanta institution, Clark Atlanta University, was ranked fourth.

The list, developed by Dr. Thomas LaVeist, a sociologist and an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, was designed to help make choosing a school less daunting for today's college-bound African American students and their parents.

LaVeist asked 1,077 African American higher education professionals to rate colleges by the academic and social environments that are provided for African American students.

Florida A&M University, last year's Time magazine "College of the Year," ranked third on the Black Enterprise/DayStar list. The other institutions filling out the top ten are: Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Xavier University, New Orleans; Hampton University, Hampton, Va.; Tuskeegee University, Tuskegee, Ala.; North Carolina A&T University, Greensboro, N.C.; and Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.

HBCU's in general scored high marks on the list. While they accounted for only 10 percent of all the colleges LaVeist surveyed, they represented nearly 50 percent of the colleges on the list. Nationally, HBCU's enroll approximately 35 percent of all Black college students.

Black Enterprise joins the list of magazines, including U.S. News and World Report and Money that publish popular editions ranking colleges and universities. Although college and university officials dislike the lists, they recognize that students and parents use the lists to select college.