Research & Studies

In 2024, the share of Black applicants to U.S. medical schools increased by 2.8 percent from 2023. However, the share of Black medical school matriculants decreased by 11.6 percent. Notably, there has been year-over-year progress in overall Black medical school representation, which has risen to from 7.9 percent in 2017 to 10.3 percent in 2024.

Black and White teachers in New York City are less likely to quit or transfer to another school if their school has a principal and a higher proportion of teachers of their same race.

A team of scholars led by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta has found Black athletes are five times as likely as White athletes to experience a heart attack or die from sudden cardiac complications.

According to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the percentage of students who began college in the fall of 2018 and earned a credential within six years rose to 61.1 percent. For Black students who enrolled in 2018, 43.8 percent had earned a degree or other credential within six years. This is more than 17 percentage points below the overall rate. And the racial gap has increased in recent years.

A new study by scholars at the medical schools of New York University and Yale University finds that African American or Black students were less likely than their White counterparts to feel that medical school training contributed to their development as a person and physician.

Of African Americas who had firm employment commitments by the time they received their doctorate in 2023, 25.3 had jobs in the corporate world compared to 36.1 percent of Whites who had job commitments by the time they were awarded their doctorate. For both Blacks and Whites, doctoral graduates are becoming increasingly more likely to take high-paying jobs in the private sector rather that staying in the academic world.

A new study from scholars at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Alabama, has found racial achievement gaps grow more quickly in districts where Black and Hispanic students attend higher-poverty schools than their White peers.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has examined the long-term effects on educational attainment and economic outcomes for Black and Hispanic students in Texas, California, Washington, and Florida - the first four states to ban affirmative action in higher education admissions decisions.

A new report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that in January 2024, nearly 228,000 of the 771,000 homeless population was African American. Thus, Black Americans made up 29.5 percent of all those classified as homeless.

Walden University, headquartered in Minneapolis but conducts most of its business online, awarded 1,536 doctorates to African Americans during the five-year period. This was 12 percent of all doctorates awarded to Black Americans during the five-year period. The only other universities awarding more than 200 doctorates to African Americans were two historically Black educational institutions, Howard University and Jackson State University.

Over the past two decades, 50 percent of Black and 40 percent of Hispanic student loan borrowers have experienced a loan default, compared to 29 percent of their White counterparts.

In the fall of 2024, Black students made up 7.7 percent of all first-year students at law schools in the United States. Among the 2024 cohort of 3,060 entering Black students, 2,099 were women. Thus, women made up nearly 69 percent of all Black first-year law students.

A new study has found that while diversity has grown among America's college-educated adults , diversity in the country's teacher workforce is lagging behind.

The number of Black Americans killed at work in 2022 was the highest number recorded since statistics on workplace fatalities have been collected. But in 2023, Black fatalities at work declined by more than 10 percent.

In 2023, 890 doctoral degrees were awarded in fields where none of the recipients were African Americans.

Scholars from Cornell University have found removing race data from AI applicant-ranking algorithms results in a less diverse applicant pool without meaningfully increasing the group's academic merit.

Despite remaining far below the representation of White professors, Black law faculty are the second most represented racial group in their field. 

African Americans earned 7.7 percent of all doctorates earned by U.S. residents and permanent residents. But Blacks are vastly underrepresented in some disciplines. For example, Blacks earned only 1.9 percent of all doctorates awarded in the geological sciences, 1.2 percent of all mathematics doctorates, 2.5 percent of all doctorates in physics, and 1.9 percent of all doctorates in astronomy.

Among highly selective institutions, Black first-year student enrollment dropped by a staggering 16.9 percent this year, the sharpest drop of any major racial group. This was the first admissions cycle since the Supreme Court ended the use of race-sensitive admissions at colleges and universities.

There were 3,213 scholars from sub-Saharan African nations teaching at U.S. colleges and universities in the 2022-22 academic year. This was up more than 44 percent after nearly a 50 percent increase in the prior year.