How Well Does Your Public University Treat Black Students? New Effort Assigns Grades, State by State

Andrew Zinn, U. of Southern California

Black public-university students in two states with the highest percentage of African-American residents are among the most disadvantaged nationwide, according to a new report that grades both public universities and states on how well they attract and graduate black students.

Louisiana earned the lowest rating in the report, published on Tuesday by the University of Southern California, despite having the second-highest percentage of black residents. Mississippi, the state with the largest share of its population identifying as African-American, was ranked fourth-lowest on how inclusive its public universities are.

The report, released by the university’s Race and Equity Center and co-authored by Shaun R. Harper, the center’s executive director, measured black-student equity in state universities based on four indicators: how closely the percentage of black students matches the demographics of that state; how closely the gender makeup of the black-student population mirrors the gender makeup of all students, regardless of race; how closely black students’ six-year graduation rates match that of all students; and the ratio of black students to black professors.

Using that formula, researchers rated public universities and then averaged those ratings to grade states. The states that fared worse in the analysis were those in the Deep South. Louisiana, whose population is one-third black, scored 1.18 on the report’s four-point scale. Mississippi, which is 37-percent African-American, received a score of 1.42.

West Coast universities, whose states have smaller black populations, fared better by the report’s metrics. Washington earned a 2.59, California a 2.46, and Oregon a 2.07. The highest-rated state in the analysis was Massachusetts, which earned a 2.81.

The study acknowledged a handful of limitations in its analysis, including that universities with a “pathetically low” number of black professors were rewarded by its “black students-to-black faculty” metric.

The report is not the first to grade minority representation, state by state. Two reports by the Education Trust, released in June, judged how well states had closed the gap in degree attainment between Hispanic and African-American adults and white adults since 2000. One of the reports found that both Louisiana and Mississippi had performed “below average” in closing the gap between white and black degree attainment.

The University of Southern California study also found that even though 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are black, black students make up barely 10 percent of full-time enrollments at state universities. The report also shows that 44 percent of public universities have 10 or fewer black full-time faculty members.

Follow Andy Tsubasa Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.