Rate of Minorities Attending College on Decline

The percentage of minority young people attending college has plummeted since the mid-1970s, and the decline, surprisingly, has been about as sharp for middle-class students as poor ones, a report said Sunday.

The study by the American Council on Education said the percentage of white young people going to college, meanwhile, has increased, “widening the longstanding college-participation gap between whites and African Americans and Hispanics.”

“Since the mid-1970s, the college participation of African Americans and Hispanics has been a picture not of progress, but of major regression,” said the Eighth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education.

The study attributed the decline at least partly to a shift in helping students pay for college with loans instead of grants, higher college admission standards and increasing numbers of young black men from middle-income and upper-income backgrounds joining the military.

The study said that between 1976 and 1988 the percentage of low-income black high school graduates going to college declined from 40% to 30% and that the percentage of low-income Latinos fell from 50% to 35%, “indicating an educational failure rate of intolerable magnitude.”

The college participation rate for middle-income blacks fell from 53% in 1976 to 36% in 1988, and the corresponding rates for Latinos dropped from 53% in 1976 to 46% in 1988, the report found.

“We suspected, of course, that most of the decline we had seen over the last 12 to 13 years was taking place with lower-income students,” Deborah Carter, who wrote the study with Reginald Wilson, told reporters.

“We were somewhat surprised to see the decline, particularly for African Americans, was almost equally as great for low-income students as with middle-income students,” she said.

Among blacks, the decline in college participation was steepest for men.