Decline in Black Admissions to Universities

If you are a student at an HBCU, looking around your classroom or on the yard hoping to see a familiar brown face is probably never an issue, but for students at colleges and universities where African American enrollment is now steadily declining, it is definitely a concern.

Larissa Lincoln, a senior sociology major at the University of Washington knows what it is like to feel alienated or alone on campus. “Sometimes when I’m in a lecture there will be 200 people and I can count about six or seven black students. Its very noticeable walking around that there is not enough blacks being admitted to college.”

After the 2003 Supreme Court decision that required schools like the University of Michigan to change their admittance procedure and evaluate students not based on their minority status, but individually, Michigan is now reporting the smallest class of African American freshmen in 15 years.

Many state universities in California, Georgia and much of the Midwest have also noticed a significant decline when it comes to admitting blacks. Enrollment for freshmen at the University of Georgia was down by 26 percent, 29 percent for Ohio State and 32 percent at the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign.

While there is no single explanation for the low numbers, a few factors should be taken into consideration. According to Jason S. Mironov, President of the University of Michigan’s