These students often come from poor or blue-collar communities and attend private school on scholarship. What’s more, the Ivies and other elite colleges disproportionately tap an even narrower niche for the black students it admits: elite private day and boarding schools like Phillips Exeter, Harvard Westlake, and Trinity. But one long-term study cited by Tough shows that at “highly selective private colleges,…students from black immigrant families plus students with one black and nonblack parent from about 40 percent of black students in the 1980s…to about 60 percent in the late 1990s.” (Of course, many black Caribbean immigrants are descendants of people enslaved in Caribbean countries.) ‘Privileged Poor’ vs. Only between 9% and 13% of black American 18- and 19-year-olds are immigrants or come from immigrant families. This was noted as far back as 2003 by prominent African-American scholars Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr. “It is unlikely,” Tough concludes, that elite colleges “will increase the number of black students they admit anytime soon.”Īnd the black students that elite colleges do admit increasingly come from either mixed-race backgrounds or immigrant families from Africa or the Caribbean. Neither school responded to an emailed request for comment by deadline.Įven at Stony Brook University, a state university that I called one of the U.S.’s top 10 engines of upward mobility, blacks comprise only around 10% of undergraduate enrollment. African-Americans comprised only 6.7% of Cornell’s Class of 2023, while another 5.6% described themselves as bi- or multiracial. Back in 1984, Harvard’s freshman class was-wait for it-8% black.Īccording to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s entering classes hovered at around 10%-11% black or African-American for years, but the university reports that more than 14% of the Classes of 20 identified as black or African-American. Other Ivy League schools and “Ivy-Plus” elite universities are pretty close. “About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black,…but Princeton’s student body is 8 percent black. “The numbers really are startlingly consistent,” Tough writes. That lack of fulfillment can be quantified: 8%, the percentage of black students at Ivy League and other highly selective colleges and universities. at Princeton with academic research to tell the story of a promise that remains unfulfilled. Tough weaves together the experiences of a young African-American woman from Charlotte, N.C. The chapter “Fitting in” addresses the issues of race and class head on. His new book, “ The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,” mixes cutting-edge research with deeply moving personal stories of students from unimaginably disadvantaged backgrounds trying to “crack the code” of getting into college and succeeding once they’re there. These were some of the findings in a revelatory, sometimes explosive book by education writer Paul Tough, author of “ How Children Succeed,” a staple on many professional parents’ bookshelves. Those elite colleges also admit black students disproportionately from similarly elite private schools rather than the average or underperforming public high schools students of color often attend. rather than descendants of enslaved blacks forcibly brought to America’s shores. Highly selective colleges, epitomized by the Ivy League, have seen black enrollment stagnate, and increasingly they have admitted the sons and daughters of voluntary black immigrants to the U.S.
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