The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
A glance at the current issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: Black student enrollment at America’s top colleges
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had the highest percentage of African-American freshmen last year among highly ranked universities and liberal-arts colleges, according to the journal’s annual report on the topic.
The 416 black freshmen at UNC last fall represented 11.1 percent of the entire class. The number of African-American freshmen at Chapel Hill was 3 percent higher than it was in 2004, when Duke University topped the survey. This year, however, Duke and Stanford Universities shared the third spot on the list, with freshman classes that were 9.5 percent black. The University of Virginia, at second place, had a freshman class that was 10.2 percent African-American.
With just a single black freshman last year, the university at the bottom of the list was the California Institute of Technology. This was the second straight year that the university failed to enroll more than one black student in its freshman class. Over the past 12 years, the highest number of African-American freshmen that CalTech has ever had in a single year was eight, according to the survey. [Ed: note, however, that the entering classes at Caltech probably averaged around 220 students.]
What would be really interesting to see is a ranking of the most selective colleges and universities according to the size of the difference (if any) between the average SAT scores of the entering black freshmen and the average for the entering freshmen who are not black, with the highest ranking being given to the college with the smallest difference.
For some reason I suspect that Caltech might be at the top of that list.
The realities of life at caltech tells us that the institution practices race preferences as it sees fit. A black freshman at Caltech who enrolled last year from Sylmar Hi school is an example. This particular freshman participated at a math constes t at Los Angeles Community College while still in hi school. He ranked 19th in the contest. I would like to know how many of the 18 others who ranked higher than him ended up at Caltech. I know his name.