The percentage of Black students doubled during the Black Campus Movement to diversify higher education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1976, the Black enrollment has more than doubled once again, from 943,000 to 2,269,000 in 2008. The Black share of the overall enrollment in American higher education increased from about 5 percent in 1965 to 10 percent in 1976 to 14 percent in 2008.
Without question, more Black and Latino students are in college in 2012 than 40 years ago. In terms of the total pie, non-Whites have a larger piece than ever before. They are walking into historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs) in unprecedented numbers.
This is progress.
This fits nicely into the positive ending of a story of racial progress that Americans like to tell. This is a pleasant speaking point for the engineers of the current affirmative action policies when scolded for not doing enough.
We should be pleased with today’s bird’s eye view of the racial makeup of our student body, specifically when we can imagine the lack of color birds saw forty years ago. Based on their share of high school graduates (14.5 in 2004) and the American population (12.8 in 2008), the total enrollment figure of 14 percent seems to tell us that Blacks are well represented in the student body of higher education.
However, upon a closer look the disparities, the overrepresentations, the under-representations begin to surface in clear and present view. We are forced to crumple up and throw away the happy ending of the progress story. As we get closer to the surface — to the complexities, to the distressing realities — we may be compelled to trash the entire story of linear educational progress for our student bodies.
We know that Black and Latino students have generally become overrepresented in the community colleges and for-profit colleges that have rushed into the academy over the last few decades. We know they remain overrepresented in the pool of students who did not go to college, while they have become significantly (and for the first two alarmingly) overrepresented in the high school dropout crew, prisons and the military.
