Study Finds Low Graduation Rates for Black Male Student Athletes in Six Major Conferences

Nationwide the college graduation rate for Black male students is 38 percent. For students on athletic scholarships, the graduation rates for Black men is 49 percent.

But a new study conducted by researchers at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania finds that Black male student athletes at educational institutions of the nation’s six leading athletic conferences do not fare as well. The results showed that only 22 schools in these six major conferences graduated their Black male student athletes at a rate that was higher than for their Black male students as a whole.

The top performer was Kansas State University where the Black male student athlete graduation rate was 21 percent higher than the graduation rate for Black men as a whole at the university.

Overall, at schools in these conferences, Northwestern had the highest Black male student athlete graduate rate at 83 percent. The University of Notre Dame, Villanova University, and Penn State all had graduation rates for Black male student athletes of at least 78 percent. The lowest graduation rates for Black male student athletes were at Iowa State, the University of South Florida, the University of Arizona, and the University of Arkansas.