Tomás Rivera Policy Institute Research Documents Trends in Black/Latino Higher Education

TRPI has released a report entitled: African American and Latino Enrollment Trends among Medicine, Law, Business, and Public Affairs Graduate Programs. The purpose of the report is to provide an analysis of the fields of medicine, business, law, and public affairs, and to present other relevant data pertaining to African American and Latino students in graduate education. The first section provides an overview of action policy and court cases. The second analyzes the relationship between affirmative action and nationwide enrollment trends of African American and Latino students in the four selected professional programs indicated.

Discovery:

• There have been significant improvements since the 1970s in high school graduation rates of African American and Latino students. Despite this, a low rate of African American and Latino high school alumni restricts the pool for medicine, business, law and public affairs students, because these disciplines require a bachelor’s degree.
• Multiple reasons and processes account for an underrepresentation of African American and Latino students in certain graduate programs, including factors stemming from affirmative action policy and court cases that have resulted from it.
• Institutional enrollment data from a significant number of schools need to be more transparent and more available so that the results of data analysis can be made public.
• Latino and African American applicants do not often have a lineage rooted in education from elite institutions, reducing their access to these gateways in fields of law, medicine, business and public affairs. (Half of the country’s business leaders come from elite schools, which comprise .5% of the nation’s colleges.)

National Enrollment Trends:

• The elimination of affirmative action has sharply decreased the number of underrepresented students enrolling in medical schools. African American applicants who applied to the top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 25%, from 5,379 in 1995 to 4,033 in 2001. Latino applicants to the same schools decreased 38.6%, from 2,769 in 1995 to 1,700 in 2001. Together, African American and Latino enrollment in the nation’s top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 11.2% and 27.2% respectively.
• From fall 1995 to fall 2006, the number of admitted African American and Latino students in University of California’s three law schools declined by 28% under California’s anti-affirmative action movement.
• Over the past nine years, there has been an increase in undergraduate business degrees awarded to African American and Latino students. These degrees rose from 9% of total degrees in the US in 1995-1996, to 15% in the 2003-2004 academic year. However, it should be noted that this statistic is not in keeping with growth of the African American and Latino population in the U.S., currently at 25%.
• MBA degrees for African Americans and Latinos are increasing faster than that of other master’s degrees (though it is also not in keeping with growth of the African American and Latino population in the U.S.).
• Public affairs master’s degrees train students for careers in government, business, media, nonprofit organizations, NGOs and other international organizations. M.A.s in underrepresented groups have increased from 18% in 1996 to 25% in 2004 (though the numbers are inconsistent with the growth of the African American and Latino populations in the U.S.).

Going further, TRPI’s Professor President Harry P. Pachon said, “It is not a question of affirmative action, it is a question of realizing the full intellectual potential of minority students in these programs.”

Download this report from Publications page under the education header at www.TRPI.org.

The report was prepared by Rodolfo de la Garza, and Sepehr Hejazi Moghadam, from the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute office at Columbia University.

Special thanks to the Ford Foundation who made this project possible.

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