Earlier this month, the nonprofit organization The Education Trust released a report highlighting the continued lack of representation of Black and Latinx undergraduate students at top colleges and universities in the U.S.
The Education Trust focuses on closing educational opportunity gaps for people of color, low-income students, and other underrepresented groups. In the nonprofit’s recent report, it evaluated the most highly selective public schools in the nation and scored them on how well their enrollment of Black and Latinx students reflected their state’s racial and ethnic demographics.
In this year’s report, the Education Trust also added 51 institutions that are as equally selective and exclusive as flagship universities. A total of 101 institutions were scored using letter grades.
The results of the study showed that at many colleges and universities, the enrollment of Black and Latinx students is lower today than it was 20 years ago. Enrollment of Latinx students at some schools had increased marginally over the past two decades, but more than 75 percent of the institutions received failing grades for their low enrollment numbers for Black students.
The authors of the Education Trust report believe that most institutions already possess the funding and endowment resources to increase enrollment of undergraduate students of color, but it is on college leaders to “make a conscious commitment to increasing access.”
The nonprofit listed recommendations for rectifying the low number of Black and Latinx student enrollment, some of which include hiring more high-quality guidance counselors, increasing aid to Black and Latinx students, and improving recruitment strategies.
