Rising Tide II: Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase?

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Rising Tide II: Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase?

March 23, 2016 by Andrew Howard Nichols, Kimberlee Eberle-Sudre, Meredith Welch

Rising Tide II: Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase? looks at a decade of graduation rates for African American students at four-year, public institutions that improved student success during the past decade. It shows that while a majority (almost 70 percent) of institutions we examined improved graduation rates for black students, those gains haven’t been large or fast enough to close gaps between black and white students. In fact, in many cases, these gaps have widened.

This paper — a companion to Rising Tide: Do College Grad Rate Gains Benefit All Students? — finds that, among institutions that have improved overall graduation rates from 2003 to 2013, more than half of them (53 percent) didn’t make the same gains for black students as they did for white students — widening gaps between groups.

Worse still, at almost one-third (or 73) of the colleges and universities that improved overall student success, graduation rates for black students were flat or declining. The report lists 27 schools that have witnessed declining graduation rates for black students and significantly widening gaps.

To illustrate how schools can raise graduation rates for all students while closing completion gaps between black and white students, our report features a list of 52 institutions that have achieved these twin goals. We hope other institutions will learn from these institutions to identify and institute practices that work best for their campuses and their students

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