@ChangeTheGame , thank you for your kind words and I wish your son the best. In looking at this group in past years it appears that the posts stopped just prior to acceptances. I hope that we will all stay around to congratulate and support each other.
The general rule is to stay away from colleges that do not have a 70% plus 4-year graduation, especially if you are being asked to pay over 30k a year. The primary point of this 70% number is not that your student will or will not be in this group it is what it tells you and the student about the academic, social, financial and other support services the school has committed to get to these numbers consistently over many years. Getting to a 70% Black Student graduation rate is really, really, really hard to do. That is why so few schools can do it.
By using the advanced search feature on College Results Online using 2017 data you can query the 4-year black student 70% graduation rate. And yes you are reading these results correctly there are only 78 schools among the 3000 in the U.S. that have accomplished this task. These numbers stay pretty consistent going back decades. So, among the usual Ivy and Baby-Ivy suspects on the list are the real GEMS, those schools who accomplish this with a class cohort with mean SAT scores between 1200-1350 or below. Oh, Did I mention how difficult this is to do consistently !
Again, By using the advanced search feature on College Results Online using 2017 data you can query the 6-year black student 70% graduation rate. And yes in this case you are reading these results correctly there are only 178 schools among the 3000 in the U.S. that have accomplished this task. Again, These numbers stay pretty consistent going back decades. Again, among the usual Ivy and Baby-Ivy suspects on the list are the real GEMS, those schools who accomplish this with a class cohort with mean SAT scores between 1200-1350 or below. Oh, Did I mention how difficult this is to do consistently !
College Transitions maintains the list of ED/EA admit rates in one place. This is for all students. You have to extrapolate for black students, which means instead of competing with 600 ED/EA students for a seat you are competing with 1-48 black students. Black students in general make up roughly 8% of total college freshman applications (number continues to shrink each year). But again most of these are applying regular decision NOT ED/EA.
Why are these graduation stats even more important than you may think, because they directly correlate with how much you pay, student loan debt, starting salary, admissions to graduate school (where salary gets higher), loan default rates and networking opportunity for future jobs. In addition, most parents simply are not aware that the average graduation period is 5-6 years, especially at the larger public schools and therefore do not calculate that into their costs.
@caged_bird , thanks so much! Iâm going to start my homework and find these gems.
As student debt now exceeds $1 Trillion dollars it continues to be the number one driver of successful outcomes after graduation. And no where is this more pronounced than in the black community. So Parents and Students are paying very close attention to career outcomes at individual colleges, especially since we now have so much reliable data thanks to the Obama administration and Payscale. The data is pretty clear on what impacts employment and salary the mostâŠin order of significance Major, GPA, Internship rates and Career Services at college. And the opportunity for the student to network with other students and alumni who may ultimately serve as career resources. Some schools have these impacts down to a science and it shows in their impressive outcomes over many years. While most are pretty clueless, but are now under tremendous pressure to get these right due to the debilitating effects student loan debt has had on the parents of incoming students. So, look at internship rates and effectiveness of career services based on student surveys.
Once again, this year The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has completed its survey of admissions offices at the nationâs highest-ranked research universities. For the 26th consecutive year, we have calculated and compared the percentages of Black/African-American students in this fallâs entering classes. As in the past, our survey publishes information on the total number of Black applicants at the various institutions, their acceptance rates, enrollment numbers, and yield rates (the percentage of students who eventually enroll in the colleges at which they were accepted). Search on âJBHE annual survey 2018â. There is a list for liberal arts schools and one for research schools. These are ONLY the top-tier schools that maintain active and robust recruiting programs, especially if student are 75th percentile and higher. My DD has been sent tagarted emails and brochures by most of these schools. Because College Board sells the names of the black students who fall within a certain SAT percentile rank to these schools.
@caged_bird Thank you for the College Results Online website. It was great to break out the data in so many creative ways. One of the weirdest data sets I saw at my daughterâs HBCU was that the Pell-Grant eligible students (47% of all students Howard) graduated at an 82 percent clip, but the non-Pell eligible students only graduated at a 48 percent clip (my daughter is a non-Pell eligible student) which I would not have believed without seeing the data.
I also parceled the data around black men to review graduation rates for my son and the numbers were definitely worse in general for black men at all but the tippy top schools. Our family doesnât have a hard target for graduation rates eliminating a school from consideration, but I always review that metric and try to understand why.
I also love The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education as I have reviewed their yearly report of the nations highest ranked research universities and liberal arts colleges for years and it has some great data. Thanks for sharing for others on CCâŠ
SCHOLARSHIP QUESTION
Good morning all. Many scholarship criteria states âhave demonstrated, unmet need as verified by their college.â Does this essentially mean to be pell eligible? Trying to determine which scholarships DD is eligible for. Thanks everyone?
@MomofThree80 No, it does not mean being Pell Eligible from the explaination I received a few years ago. It just means that a scholarship could only cover what is owed that is not a part of the Expected Family Contribution (EFC). So if a school cost 50K and your EFC is 40K, you would have a demonstrated unmet need of 10K. But if the school gave you a 20K merit based scholarship, you would no longer have any demonstrated unmet need because the amount you owe (30K) is below your EFC.
@momofthree80 it usually does not. From my research, unmet need verified by college means after all grants, financial aid, and EFC, the student still falls short in money to cover tuition. Sounds like you are looking at âlast dollarâ scholarships and grants, which are only awarded after all other aid has been.
But I may be wrong, this is my first kid going to college so I donât know all the ins and outs yet.
@ChangeTheGame @MamaBear2001 Thanks. This is my first in college as well so Iâm learning as I go. I know sheâs applied to the smaller dollar scholarships and then will do the bigger ones.
Explains why some of the literature that my daughter gets in the mail (ridiculous amounts) has pictures of diverse backgrounds on it.
@Sarrip said âExplains why some of the literature that my daughter gets in the mail (ridiculous amounts) has pictures of diverse backgrounds on it.â
The reason that there are pictures of diverse backgrounds are because that is what top schools aim to have. Donât read something more into that.
Perhaps I worded it incorrectly because that actually is not what I meant.
@CottonTales , do you know for a fact that universities donât target specific marketing pieces toward specific segments of applicants?
It makes sense to me that a university would send STEM-related information to a student who has indicated she is interested in a STEM career. Or that a university might send information about Study Abroad to a student who checked that box in the âRequest Infoâ section. As a one-time marketer, it only makes sense to me that universities would send minority-themed material to students it knows are minorities.
I agree with you that many universities generally want to exude a spirit of inclusiveness, and one way to do that is to include images of campus diversity on all marketing collateral. However, that does not preclude marketing collateral, targeted to minorities, with a more intense focus on campus diversity.
I think @Sarrip 's comment was right in the ballpark.
This sentiment will certainly vary among familyâs but I think one reason Sarripâs comment was pertinent is that African-American parents (and the students) are often very interested in not only the amount of diversity on a particular campus, but the way a university approaches/considers/prioritizes/understands diversity. I could consider sending my son to a campus with only 3% African-Americans, but I would want to know somehow that the school valued diversity.
Iâm sending my child away to spend 4 years learning and living. I want to make sure (as far as I can) that Iâm not sending him into a den of, at best, ignorant callousness, or, at worst, racist sentiment. One of the laziest methods I use to help me decide this is to look at how diversity is handled in a collegeâs marketing material. No final decision is made from this, but an impression is made when I see no minorities pictured (or only 1), versus when I see significant diversity.
Itâs fairly easy to guess sometimes which colleges send different packages to students. When we receive a brochure from a school with 5% African-Americans, but the brochure is half full of African-American students and professors, thatâs a clue. And it is an effort that is, at least in my eyes, appreciated.
Yes, I know itâs a calculated move to convince minorities that âThis University Cares About You.â But itâs better to have the university show their desire for diversity in print, even if they havenât yet shown it via admissions.
Also, we canât visit every university my son has an interest in. Iâd prefer that he has some minority professors, but I canât always just âknowâ which schools have more than a token number of minority professors. If the brochure pictures 4 different minority professors, I know they have at least that many. 
When a university sends information that not only mention minority organizations on campus, but sends âpersonalâ letters from minority students speaking to their experiences on campus, I know itâs a targeted mailing. And I appreciate that. I see nothing wrong with it.
When a university has minority students call our home and ask to speak to my son, I know itâs minority-focused outreach. I appreciate that. When I was a high school senior long ago, Brown University had minority students call me and ask me to apply. I was flattered. That sort of attention to minority detail mattered to me then, and it matters to me now.
Please excuse the typos above. Trying to compose my thoughts while a middle schooler is vying for my attention leads to that.