Graduation Rate Gap: Is The Glass Full, Or Half Empty?

For the past 11 years the University of Virginia has had a higher black graduation rate than any other public university. As the January 13 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports,

The University of Virginia has the highest black student graduation rate of this group at 86 percent. In fact, the black student graduation rate at the University of Virginia is higher than the black student graduation rate at four Ivy League institutions: Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Not surprisingly, the University of Virginia itself is proud to trumpet these findings, and it added:

the JBHE article also compared the differences between graduation rates of white and black students. Virginia was joined at the top of this list by the University of California at Irvine and the State University of New York at Albany with a 5 percent difference between the graduation rates for white and black students.

“At three of the Public Ivies, the black student graduate rate is only five percentage points below the rate for whites,” the article noted. “By far the most impressive is the University of Virginia with its high black student graduate rate of 86 percent and its small racial difference in graduation rates.”

I have some doubts about the gap number, since for the past several years, and including the most recent data I’ve been able to find, the black white graduation gap at UVa has held steady at about 7% (94% to 87%). I wonder if the black graduation rate might not have been compared to the overall graduation rate, which has been 91% or 92%.

Although any of these numbers may be what JBHE describes as a “small racial difference,” in fact there is a glass-is-half-full quality to this gap at what is, after all, the public university and “public ivy” at which blacks do best in the whole country, as I pointed out earlier (here) regarding figures such as these. For example, taking UVa’s most recent data, linked above, 13% of the blacks who entered in 1998 failed to graduate in six years, compared to 6% of the whites and 6% of the Asians. Put another, less optimistic way, blacks failed to graduate at a rate over twice as high as whites and Asians.