BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Lehigh University did a good job wooing Nezy Smith. A Lehigh admissions officer met the African-American honor roll student at her high school in Lebanon, Pa., then kept in touch for a year, urging her to visit the campus and helping her to fill out complex financial aid forms.
Smith arrived at Lehigh in 2008, elated to experience college life and dismissing cautions by some upperclassmen that as a minority student she might sometimes feel unwelcome on the 146-year-old campus and on its social scene, including parties in the hilltop fraternity houses.
A few months into her freshman year, though, Smith and a group of Black friends waited in vain outside a frat house while a member waved others in. And at times she felt uneasy being the only Black face in the classroom, despite doing well in her business and German courses.
By the next winter, she was gone, joining the roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of Black and Hispanic students who start at Lehigh but don’t finish. The institution that had worked so hard to attract Smith hadn’t done such a good job of keeping her, spotlighting a problem seen at colleges nationwide.
A lot of attention has been given to the push to make higher education more diverse, with colleges trumpeting their enrollment of underrepresented students.
But Black and Hispanic students are, on average, far less likely to graduate in six years than their White and Asian peers.
Some colleges defy the trend, graduating all students at the same rates, according to a 2010 report by the Washington-based nonprofit Education Trust. Using these schools as an example, the Education Trust concludes that a graduation gap is not inevitable.
