College Enrolls Fewer Blacks

For the first time in 20 years, Harvard failed to lead the nation in the percentage of black students who accepted its admissions offers, according to a study published in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

Stanford University surpassed Harvard in black student yield, with 64.4 percent of black candidates accepting admissions offers compared to Harvard’s 61.2 percent.

The percentage of black first-year students at the College dropped 4.3 percent for the Class of 2006 compared to the previous class. This year, there are 112 black first-year students, while there were 118 black students in the Class of 2005.

Students and administrators attributed the trend to increased competition for black candidates as other elite schools improve their minority recruitment and offer more diverse student bodies.

And while media reports have suggested last year’s clash between University President Lawrence H. Summers and former University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 led many prospective black students to go elsewhere, those at Harvard said there is little evidence to support that claim.

Alonzo Sherman ’03, who is one of two African-American coordinators for the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program and president of the Black Men’s Forum, said he spoke with a large number of pre-frosh last spring. The Summers-West conflict was only one of many topics over which those students expressed concern, Sherman said.

“Many students asked about Cornel West, but they asked about a host of other things as well,” Sherman said. “It would be unfair and inaccurate to look at it as being strongly connected to the decline in black student yield.”

Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 said she shared a similar view.

“I have been very reluctant to attribute this somewhat disappointing yield to any one phenomenon,” McGrath Lewis said.

“Students have range of interests, and I find it a little condescending to assume one factor by itself could contribute to their decision to not come to Harvard.”

McGrath Lewis said she believes this year’s drop in black student yield is part of a larger trend of declining black student enrollment at the College over the past 10 years. While 9 percent of first-year students were black in 1993, black students comprise only 6.8 percent of the Class of 2006.

And while the percentage of black students accepting admissions offers from Harvard reached a peak of roughly 74 percent in the mid-1990s, McGrath Lewis said black student yields have been declining fairly steadily ever since.

McGrath Lewis said she attributes this trend to greater competition from Harvard’s peers in the recruitment of minority students.

“There’s no question this has been an increasingly competed-for group of students,” she said. “There’s been increased competition and good competition from other colleges, and I’m convinced that’s the reason behind most of the effect.”

The increased diversity at other schools also makes them more attractive to black students, she said.“I think they’re being heavily recruited by a lot of colleges and figuring out—quite accurately—that there may be several comfortable places where they could enroll,” McGrath Lewis continued.

McGrath Lewis warned against reading too much into year-to-year fluctuations because the small number of black students at the College makes the group’s admissions yield statistics extremely variable.

“A migration of five or 10 people has a relatively dramatic effect,” McGrath Lewis said.

Sherman agreed with that interpretation.

“The statistics can be misleading,” he said. “If a few students decided to come to Harvard instead of Stanford, Princeton or Yale the black student yield would be up.”

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.