When black men succeed in higher education

The litany of bad news about the status of black men in higher education in the US is by now familiar. They make up barely 4% of all undergraduate students. They come into college less prepared than their peers for the rigours of college-level academic work. Their completion rates are the lowest of all major racial and ethnic groups in the US, writes Doug Lederman for Inside Higher Ed.

That single-minded theme struck Shaun R Harper, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, as incomplete, since it didn't reflect his own experience or that of many black men he knew. In a study released last week, the first from his new Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at Penn, Harper analyses a cohort of 219 black men (at a range of institutional types) who meet rigorous criteria that define them as "achievers", to understand both how and why they succeeded in college, and what campus leaders and others might do to help others follow in their footsteps.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site