At a time when more blacks are graduating from high school, some educators are becoming alarmed by the declining rate of black enrollment in colleges.
If present trends continue, they fear, that decline will have an impact not only on blacks but also on whites and the American economy.
According to the American Council on Education`s sixth annual report on
”Minorities in Higher Education,” the enrollment rate for blacks pursuing higher education has been going down since 1976.
Drawing on Census Bureau data, the report noted that from 1976 through 1985, the percentage of black high school graduates who entered college fell to 26.1 percent after increasing to 33.5 percent in 1976 from 29.2 percent in 1971.
”This decline is particularly alarming since during this same period the number and rate of blacks graduating from high school increased significantly,” the report said.
In 1976, just more than two-thirds, or 67.5 percent, of the 3.3 million 18-to-24-year-old blacks graduated from high school, the report said. In 1985, the figures had increased to 75.6 percent of 3.7 million.
Some government officials assert that given the increase in high school graduation rates, it is only natural that the percentage of blacks going to college would decline. Others dispute that view, holding that an expanded high school graduation pool should lead to expanded college enrollment.
The American Council on Education`s report noted that many black high school graduates were entering trade schools, enlisting in the military or becoming unemployed. According to the statistics, minorities now make up 32 percent of the enrollment of proprietary, business and technical schools, and blacks make up 19 percent of active duty military forces, up from 14.8 percent in 1975.
Perhaps most disturbing is that in 1986, 40.6 percent of 18- and 19-year- old black high school graduates were unemployed; and 26.7 percent of 20- to 24-year-old black high school graduates were unemployed.
Janell Byrd, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York, cites several reasons for the decline in black high school graduates going to college.
”A lot of those efforts to get blacks to college have kind of slacked off,” she said. ”Recruitment efforts, I don`t think, have been as significant as they need to be. Financial aid has certainly been a major problem. In some instances there have been additional barriers erected by college and states in the form of increasing requirements on SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests) or other tests.”
A study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education noted that as a group blacks ”have lower achievement records” than whites, contributing to the lower college enrollment figures.
Other educators have cited the high cost of college as a major obstacle for blacks, a problem exacerbated by a shift of student aid from direct federal grants to loans. There is a reluctance by some blacks to take out expensive college loans without any guarantee that the investment will lead to a high-paying job.
Aggressive recruitment of blacks by the armed forces, including promises to pick up the cost of a college education, also has resulted in some blacks deciding to join the military rather than going directly to college.
Reginald Wilson, director of the American Council on Education`s Office of Minority Concerns, pointed out a disturbing element in those factors:
”We must make sure one class or race is not placed in one category. Would the majority population be satisfied if all white folks worked in factories and people who ran our colleges and universities and were our doctors and lawyers were black and Hispanic? They would not stand for it-it would be a great crime against humanity. But when it`s on the other foot, it`s not so bad.”
Officials at the Department of Education contend that black educators, such as Wilson, are overstating the problem.
In a speech earlier this month to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, Education Secretary William Bennett said black college enrollment had remained steady in recent years.
”If we include black enrollments in for-profit career schools, post-secondary black enrollment stands at an all-time high,” Bennett said. ”It is true that blacks` share of the total college population declined slightly during the 1980s, but so has that of white students. The reason: increased attendance by Asians, Hispanics and other minorities.”
Though education officials can cite some in-house figures to substantiate that claim, the most recent Census Bureau figures on college enrollment do not show a decline in the percentage of white enrollment.
Black education officials object to including figures for trade and technical schools. That device is being used to pad the numbers, they contend. Mary Frances Berry, an assistant secretary of education in President Jimmy Carter`s administration, said: ”We were told a long time in the black community that if we graduated more of us from high school, our college-going rates would increase. Well, we`ve been graduating more from high school but the college-going rate is going down.”
There is no national consensus on how to raise those rates.
Bennett said the key is reaching black students at the elementary and junior high levels, raising their academic performances long before they are ready to enroll in college.
Wilson disagrees with that theory.
”If academic preparation was the cause (of the lower college enrollment), then the numbers should have been lower when the preparation was lower,” he explained. ”The preparation is better, and we still are not seeing changes.”
”There are more black high school grads now than there were 10 years ago; their scores on the SAT are better than 10 years ago; the scores on the ACT (American College Test) are better and the Department of Education`s National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that blacks are better prepared academically. So why are the numbers lower than they were 10 years ago? You can`t blame it on academic preparation,” Wilson said.
But Bruce Carnes, undersecretary of education for planning, budget and evaluation, contends that raising the academic performance of black students is the key.
”At any given high school academic level, blacks are at least as likely to go to college as whites,” he said. ”At the higher level of academic achievement in high school, they are more likely to go to college than white kids who get A`s and B`s in high school. What we need to do is get more kids achieving the A and B level in high school.”
He said about the same number of black high school students are going to college but their proportion is down because more potential dropouts are now finishing high school, an assertion his critics dismissed as ”speculative.” Berry said that if the black college enrollment figures do not increase, it could spell the demise of the black middle class.
”We know that one of the routes to upward mobility is education,” she said. ”We also know that the way some of us got to be middle-class was to go to college. If you don`t have people graduating from college, then you don`t have a middle class.”
The tools that helped increase black graduation rates in the 1960s and 1970s should be used again, Berry said.
”We know what works,” she said. ”We know we need recruitment measures, civil rights enforcement-or at least some strong rhetoric; enhancing black institutions, telling predominantly white institutions to get more blacks;
have financial aid targeted at poor kids and some societal commitment from the top down. When we stopped doing that, the numbers went down. It seems obvious that we ought to try that again.”
