The Large Racial Gap in Undergraduate Student Attrition Rates

The U.S. Census Burea recently released new data on educational enrollments in the United States for the year 2018. More than 28 percent of all African Americans 3 years old or older were enrolled in schools. For all non-Hispanics White in this age group, only 21 percent were enrolled in school. Must of the difference is the result of older African Americans over the age of 25 who are enrolled in school

Included in the data is information college enrollments by racial and ethnic group. In October 2018, there were 3,009,000 African Americans enrolled in postsecondary education. Of these, 733,000 students were enrolled in two-year colleges. Some 1,560,000 African Americans were enrolled in four-year undergraduate institutions. The data also showed that in October 2018, there were 283,000 African Americans in their first year of graduate education and 443,000 African American students in their second or further year of graduate school.

There were 715,000 African American first-year students in all undergraduate institutions, 638,000 African Americans in their second year, 552,000 in their third year and 389,000 African Americans in their fourth year of college. Thus, the number of Black students in their fourth year of college was only 54 percent of the number of Black students in their first year. In contrast, the number of non-Hispanic White students in their fourth year of college was 71.8 percent of the number of non-Hispanic White first-year students.