Wayne State University has pitched itself as the model for Black student success.
Nestled within the majority-Black city of Detroit, where only 17 percent of residents have a college degree, the public institution has spent the last dozen years standing up an exhaustive support network for students. Administrators credit that infrastructure for quadrupling the share of Black students completing their degrees. The approach has been praised and replicated nationwide.
In 2023, there was a setback: The six-year graduation rate for Black students at Wayne State fell eight percentage points — 20 percent — in a single year.
Colleges have long struggled to enroll, retain, and graduate Black students. They have the lowest persistence rate of any racial or ethnic group, with just two-thirds of freshmen returning for their sophomore year at the same institution.
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the challenges that Black students already face, including economic hardship and lack of generational knowledge about higher ed. Even with its robust student-support programs, Wayne State wasn’t immune from those disruptions, said Darryl Gardner, vice provost for student success, support, and engagement.
The dramatic one-year dip in the graduation rate — from 39.5 percent to 31.3 percent — set off alarms. Bryan C. Barnhill II, a member of the university’s politically elected Board of Governors, said at a March meeting that even the previous year’s figure was “not good enough.” Barnhill did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
“Looking at these numbers makes me want to grab every single Black student I see on campus and give them a word of encouragement and make sure they graduate,” Barnhill said after hearing the most recent statistics.
Wayne State’s big investments in academic support have made an impression on students. Having services and programs tailored to Black students’ needs is crucial, said Bailee Searcy, a sophomore.
Higher education is a complex maze that is really easy to get lost in when you have little or no guidance, or the system and the people who exist within them don’t understand your lived experience.
“Being part of a diverse group has provided me with a strong network of peers and mentors who share similar backgrounds,” Searcy said. “It has been empowering and reassuring.”
But the recent reversal of progress has been a gut check for campus officials. And there are other challenges: Even as the graduation rate has increased, enrollment of Black students at Wayne State has declined. In the backdrop are continued attacks across the country on colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which are often aimed at bolstering retention and belonging for Black students.
In response to the graduation-rate decline, Wayne State officials say they are doubling down on affordability and accessibility. There are early signs of good news: Enrollment of Black undergraduate students increased in 2023 and 2024.
Wayne State, like other colleges, is fighting an uphill battle to combat ingrained inequities for Black students and others from underrepresented backgrounds. Figuring out what to do about that, administrators and experts say, is a must for creating a diverse future work force and successful economy.
A $10-Million Bet
Wayne State began its quest to improve graduation rates in 2011, with a $10-million commitment over five years and a lot of new programs.
There were first-year experiences for students. There was a student retention and tracking system to monitor progress. There were newly hired academic advisers.
There was the Warrior Way Back Program, which provides debt forgiveness to adult students returning to the institution; Academic Pathways to Excellence, a summer bridge program for students to acclimate to university courses and culture; and the Warrior Vision and Impact Program, a learning community dedicated to fostering academic support and financial literacy.
“It’s really interesting to see how the way we started thinking about DEI at Wayne was through the lens of looking at student retention and the ability to be able to retain certain populations, particularly African American students,” said Donyale Padgett, interim vice provost for inclusive excellence and an associate professor in the communication department.
The results were almost immediate. Between 2012 and 2018, Wayne State’s six-year graduation rate for all students nearly doubled. For Black students, the rate more than doubled. The university won a national award for its gains in student achievement.
During that period, Wayne State also opened its Office of Multicultural Student Engagement, in an effort to reach more students of different identities. Today, the office hosts a full calendar of events including academic panels and cultural gatherings, and oversees two of the campus’s largest learning communities, which support Black men and women.
In addition to the multicultural office, Wayne State has a Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, a decades-old community space that provides academic opportunities and mentorship for students of Latin and Hispanic heritage. Of the 60 students accepted into the center’s learning community in 2023, 66 percent were Detroit residents and 87 percent were first-generation students. Latino/a students make up 6 percent of Wayne State’s population, as of the fall of 2022, and have a six-year graduation rate of 50 percent.
Stephanie Sanchez, a first-generation design student at Wayne State, is entering her senior year as a peer mentor at the center. She said the center opened doors for her, making introductions and connections that never would’ve been possible alone.
“A large factor that led me to attend Wayne State was the need for a sense of community with the inclusion of more diversity, knowing that lacked in my school district growing up,” said Sanchez, who’s from Macomb, a suburb outside of the city. Joining the peer-mentoring program, Sanchez added, “changed my experience here at Wayne drastically.”
These kinds of interventions are important to correct historical wrongs, including that higher ed was built to serve white people, said Nelson O.O. Zounlomé, who until recently was the diversity, equity, and inclusion program director at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. Isolation, Zounlomé said, is a driving factor behind low retention rates for students of color.
“Higher education is a complex maze that is really easy to get lost in when you have little or no guidance, or the system and the people who exist within them don’t understand your lived experience, so this sense of isolation comes in,” he said.
It’s easy for students to become overwhelmed and not seek the resources available to them, said Pauline Weber, director of college counseling and alumni advising at Detroit Cristo Rey High School, a Catholic charter school serving around 355 students in southwest Detroit.
At large colleges especially, students don’t always get the attention they need, Weber said. “They just thought things would work out, and they didn’t.”
Wayne State is essentially trying to provide the individualized advising that small colleges offer — but on a much larger scale.
The Drop and What’s Next
In the quest to close achievement gaps, Wayne State officials say they’ve been doing just about everything they can. But it wasn’t enough to prevent a substantial slide in Black students’ graduation rate last year.
Declining enrollment among Black students continued to be a problem, too. In 2012, there were around 4,500 Black undergraduates at Wayne State, representing 23 percent of the campus population. In 2022, there were 2,500 Black undergraduates, just under 16 percent of the population.
The pandemic was one key factor contributing to the decline in both enrollment and completion, according to the university. Another, administrators say, was the dwindling confidence in higher education over the past few years.
Undergraduate enrollment dropped by nearly 1.3 million students, or about 7.4 percent, between the springs of 2020 and of 2022, during the height of the pandemic. In 2023 and 2024, that trend started to reverse nationally. Wayne State’s enrollment ticked up slightly this fall.
DEI has always been under a level of scrutiny and a level of attack, but I think we have to persevere.
Searcy, the Wayne State sophomore, graduated from Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, where students take an exam to be accepted and are put on a rigorous path of college-prep courses and fine-arts education. There was an explicit emphasis on going to college, she said.
But some of Searcy’s friends decided not to pursue higher ed right away and entered the work force instead. She didn’t follow suit. “Their experiences, while insightful, didn’t make me doubt the value of pursuing my degree,” she said.
In the near term, Wayne State’s main focus is on removing barriers, administrators said.
The university has long offered the Detroit Promise scholarship, a statewide program that provides free tuition for any Detroit high-school graduate. In the fall of 2019, Wayne State expanded those efforts with its Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge, granting free tuition for all Detroit residents regardless of where they went to high school.
Wayne State has the highest number of Detroit Promise scholars of all the program’s university partners, said Jade Scott, senior director of outreach and partnerships at Detroit Promise. For the 2023-24 academic year, the university gave 428 Heart of Detroit awards, and 152 students were part of the Detroit Promise program.
Last year, officials made another affordability push with the Wayne State Guarantee, which offers free tuition to Michigan families making under $70,000 a year.
In 2022, 45 percent of Wayne State’s first-year students did not have to pay tuition and fees. This fall, according to the university, that share is six out of 10.
Wayne State officials also identified another barrier: the admissions process. In 2020, the university made standardized-test scores optional. Last year, Wayne State joined a statewide direct-admission program, in which all students with a 3.0 GPA are automatically admitted to 10 public universities across Michigan.
One change made in 2022 was initially controversial: Administrators combined two of the student-success programs created in 2011, which had become staples of the campus experience. Minority-student groups, including the Black Student Union, protested.
Wayne State officials, however, went ahead with the change, which pairs students with “success coaches” in addition to an adviser within their major and a peer mentor. The goal of the revamped program, Warrior 360, is to have different advisers directly inserted into students’ academic journeys so they can address red flags.
The new approach was effective, Gardner said, with the first cohort of Warrior 360 producing a 75- to 80-percent persistence rate, compared to 66.7 percent under the previous blueprint.
“That has paid great dividends,” Gardner said.
While Searcy, the sophomore, values Wayne State’s efforts, she said she’d like to see the university offer more major-specific support. Searcy, who works for the university’s welcome center, said that incoming Detroit public-school graduates often ask her how to manage the stress of demanding programs like nursing, which she’s studying.
In 2023 and 2024, the university increased Black enrollment. This fall there are 2,900 Black undergraduates, representing 18 percent of the campus.
Challenges to DEI Efforts
There’s another challenge looming in the background for Wayne State: Targeted student-support programs are under scrutiny amid an uptick in attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Since early 2023, 86 bills have been introduced in Congress and in 28 state legislatures that aim to restrict DEI offices, training, statements, and diversity-related admissions and employment policies. Republican lawmakers say that DEI efforts have broken antidiscrimination laws, stifled free speech, and enforced a progressive orthodoxy on campuses. Advocates for equity push back, saying DEI efforts are critical for overcoming decades of exclusionary practices.
Colleges in more than two-dozen states have dismantled diversity-related activities in response to new state laws and pressure from politicians and others. Some colleges have gone beyond what’s legally required and axed identity-based centers and scholarships.
Michigan has barred race-based admissions and programs for more than two decades. Wayne State has structured its efforts to avoid race-based criteria but still tailors its resources toward certain populations.
While Michigan lawmakers have not come after colleges’ DEI efforts, Padgett, the interim vice provost at Wayne State, is worried about the broader landscape that is threatening equity programs.
“DEI has always been under a level of scrutiny and a level of attack, but I think we have to persevere,” Padgett said. “On the ground, we know that without these efforts, we really risk setbacks in progress related to things like recruitment and retention, belonging, levels of engagement, and just the kind of innovation that comes from having diverse people as a part of a community.”
Last month, Wayne State took a step that many colleges across the country have taken, announcing that Padgett’s title, which had been interim associate provost for diversity and inclusion, would change. “Diversity” was removed, and she is now interim vice provost for inclusive excellence. Her office has also been renamed.
Wayne State’s big gains in student success since 2011 — for Black students, yes, but also for all students — offer evidence that targeted interventions can yield positive results. But the next phase will be in the hands of fresh leadership.
Two of the leaders who developed much of Wayne State’s student-support framework announced last year that they would leave the university: M. Roy Wilson, who’d been president since 2013, and Marquita Chamblee, who’d served as the first chief diversity officer since 2014.
Padgett now holds the chief diversity officer role, until a national search takes place next summer. It’s an intimidating seat to fill, Padgett said, as “the days of creating programs in a vacuum are long gone.” Now Padgett and the university’s new president, Kimberly Andrews Espy, will have to figure out how to sustain those efforts and craft big-picture strategies — for the campus and its larger community in Detroit.
One of the first orders of business: getting Black students’ graduation rate back on track.
Disclosure: Amelia Benavides-Colón, a 2024 graduate of Wayne State University, is a four-year recipient of the Heart of Detroit tuition pledge.
