Yale Tops Harvard in Black Enrollment

Yale surpassed Harvard and topped the Ivy League in black freshman enrollment figures this fall, according to statistics published by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JHBE).

The number of black students entering Yale this year jumped to a record 9.3 percent from last year’s 6.7 percent. These figures are the highest in the last decade for Yale, the JBHE found.

Until last year, Yale had been witnessing a decade-long decline in the percentage of black students in its entering class, dropping to seventh place among the eight Ivy League schools just last year.

“Yale obviously has made some efforts to boost their numbers and they should get credit for it,” said R. Bruce Slater, managing editor of JBHE.

Harvard’s 145 black freshmen, constituting 8.9 percent of the Class of 2008, also represent an increase from last year’s 8.5 percent.

“Harvard is also seeing one of its best years of the decade in terms of number of black students,” Slater said.

Harvard’s enrollment figures for black students reached bottom in 2002 after Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74, a prominent scholar in what was then called the Department of Afro-American Studies, left Harvard for Princeton. But Slater said Harvard “has rebounded nicely.”

Yale is “thrilled with the outcome,” said Dean of Admissions Richard H. Shaw, but they “weren’t trying to reverse anything.”

“Yale has always been committed to attracting and reaching out to all populations,” he said.

The Yale community outside the admissions office has also been feeling the increase in black enrollment figures.

“After there was a definite drop in the figures from my year [class of 2006] to the next, the increase has been pretty obvious,” said Adrian J. Hopkins, the former political action chair of the Black Student Alliance at Yale.

“We’ve seen a resurgence in freshman involvement in black student organizations’ activities,” he said.

Hopkins attributed the decline to the labor tensions on campus, which he said was “one of the major factors in the decision of black students in the class of 2007.”

The Harvard community of black students is experiencing a similar upsurge in involvement, which student leaders attribute to increasing enrollment.

“I’ve definitely noticed a steady increase in the numbers of black students on campus,” said Brandon M. Terry ’05, former president of the Harvard Black Men’s Forum.

“The biggest factor, I would say, is the great job the black community on campus has done to make people feel comfortable once they get here, putting on great events over prefrosh weekend,” he said.

But Terry said that Harvard’s efforts at recruiting black students did not always focus on the right sectors of the black population.

“They do so indiscriminately, getting a lot of first generation immigrants from Africa or the Carribeans,” he said. “This creates a situation in which the people who fought for affirmative action, the actual descendents of African-American slaves, no longer benefit from their policies.”