The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has recently published its useful survey of the first year enrollment figures for blacks at 20 of the nation’s top rated universities, public and private, for 2008.
Nothing too surprising in the data. Brown, for example, admitted a little over 13% of all applicants but 22% of black applicants. The University of Virginia admitted 36.3% of all applicants but 47.4% of black applicants.
There are, however, two issues about this survey that are worth pointing out. First, the data would be much more useful if the “overall student acceptance rate” were disaggregated, since that category includes the black applicants. That is, the most relevant comparison is between the black acceptance rate and the acceptance rate for whites and Asians, not between blacks and the entire pool that contains the blacks.
Second, although there is no reason for this to be a surprise, is the refusal of several of the listed colleges to reveal the number of blacks accepted or their black acceptance rates. The most egregious of these was, again not surprisingly, the University of Michigan, which refused to reveal even the number of its black applicants. The only number it was willing to reveal was the number of black enrollees, 374, the largest of any of the 20 schools.
In most cases, there is sufficient information to compute the fraction of non-Black students that were admitted. For example, at Brown, 13.7% of all students were admitted, while just under 13.2% of non-Black students were admitted. The difference between these two numbers will not be very large as long as Black students form a small (about 10%) fraction overall.
However, NONE of these statistics allow us to compare admission standards between Black students and non-Black students, since we don’t know how the quality of Black applicants compared to the quality of non-Black applicants.
That information is irrelevant when considering the agenda in disseminating said ratios. Black acceptance rates are higher than the average. The average includes all other ethnicities. If you subtract the black acceptance rates from the pool of averages then you are bound to arrive at one conclusion invariably and that is an even lower acceptance rate for all applicants that are not black. Law of averages, plain and simple. Just take it on good faith that the number of accepted applicants in the white category will be lower than the average and a higher acceptance percentage for Asians perhaps even higher than the percentage reported for black students, thus sinking the percentage of white students accepted in college lower still. White man’s burden, gotta love it.