CUNY Seeing Fewer Blacks at Top Schools

This is a really tough issue -- one that's emblematic of similar problems nationwide:

The enrollment of black students at three of the most prestigious colleges of the City University of New York has dropped significantly in the six years since the university imposed tougher admissions policies.

The real problem, of course, is not admissions policies, but the fact that there are painfully few black students graduating from high school at all -- and those that do are, by and large, not well prepared for college.  This is the direct result of the fact that they are FAR more likely to have had way too many highly ineffective teachers.  THIS is the problem that has to be addressed, not what colleges' admissions policies should be.

 

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CUNY Seeing Fewer Blacks at Top Schools

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Published: August 10, 2006

The enrollment of black students at three of the most prestigious colleges of the City University of New York has dropped significantly in the six years since the university imposed tougher admissions policies.

One of the sharp declines has come at the City College of New York, CUNY’s flagship campus, in Harlem, which was at the center of bitter open admissions battles in the late 1960’s. Black students, who accounted for 40 percent of City College’s undergraduates as recently as 1999, now make up about 30 percent of the student body there, figures provided by the university show.

At Hunter, a competitive liberal arts campus on the East Side of Manhattan, the share of black students fell to 15 percent last year from 20 percent in 1999. And at Baruch, a campus that specializes in business, the proportion of black students slipped to 14 percent from 24 percent. Over all, the number of black undergraduates at CUNY, including those in associate’s degree programs, grew to 57,791 last year from 52,937 in 1999, the figures show...