Graduate Schools

In 2017, there were 188,838 Black students enrolled in graduate schools in the United States. They made up 12.6 percent of all enrollments. There were 56,765 Black men and 130,006 Black women enrolled in graduate school.

The Mentoring@Purdue program pairs students with faculty or staff members and includes a summer scholars program which brings undergraduate students from historically Black colleges and universities to Purdue's campus for a week-long program that teaches them how to start applying to graduate schools.

The program will be 100 percent online and will offer two concentrations; one for teacher leaders, and another for initial certification. The total tuition will be less than $7,000, making it one of the most affordable online graduate teaching programs in North Carolina.

The good news is that African Americans have greatly increased their percentage of graduate student enrollments. The bad news is that a large share of African American students are taking on debt to finance their graduate education.

If we look at total enrollments in U.S. graduate schools, we find that in 2018, there were 1,869,845 students. Of these, 190,224, or 10.2 percent were African Americans. Women made up 69.5 percent of all African American graduate school enrollments.

The degree is a two-year program designed to provide the foundational knowledge and skills for students to work in the health psychology field. The first students are expected to enroll in the program during the Fall 2021 semester.

In the fall of 2019, Blacks were more than 18 percent of total first-time enrollments in graduate programs in public administration but only 4.5 percent of first-time graduate enrollments in physical sciences and 5.8 percent in engineering.

For Black student athletes who entered college in 2013 at NCAA Division I institutions, 59 percent earned their diplomas within six years. This is 11 percentage points higher than the rate for Black students as a whole at these institutions.

Dr. Christie-Mizell is a professor of sociology and had been serving as dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Science at the university. He joined the faculty in 2010. Previously, he taught at the University of South Carolina, the University of Akron, and Kent State University.

New data from the National Science Foundation show that in pre-pandemic America enrollments in graduate programs in science, engineering, and health fields at U.S. academic institutions were increasing. The increase in Black enrollments in these disciplines increased faster than the rate for enrollments as a whole.

In the fall of 2020, 53,754 African Americans enrolled in graduate school for the first time. African Americans made up 12.3 percent of all first-time graduate enrollees from the United States in 2020. Of these, 69.4 percent were women.

Dr. Priestley joined the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 2009 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris. He became an associate professor in 2015 and a full professor in 2019.

Emory University states that the doctoral program is the first of its kind in the southeastern United States and the first at a private university in the entire South. Each student in the program will receive specialized training in one of three fields: gender and sexuality; social justice and social movements; or expressive arts and cultures. The first students will enroll in the fall of 2023.

Only 19.4 percent of all African Americans who earned doctorates in 2021 had no education-related debt when they earned their terminal degree. For Whites, 51.7 percent had no education-related debt. The median education debt for Whites was $45,000. African Americans who earned doctorates in 2021, had an average student debt of $110,000.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation recently announced CMU Rales Fellows Program is expected each year to underwrite 86 graduate students in STEM fields in perpetuity, educating thousands of research and industry leaders in the coming decades.