Who Are the Black Students at America’s Elite Colleges and Universities?
Now a new study by Professors Douglas S. Massey, Margarita Mooney, and Kimberly C. Torres of Princeton University and Camille Z. Charles of the University of Pennsylvania shows that black students who are not able to claim to be descendants of American slaves make up an even larger percentage of the black students at America’s most selective colleges and universities than is the case in the nation as a whole. This study, published in the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Education, finds that 27 percent of black students at 28 highly selective colleges and universities had at least one parent who was born outside the United States. But nationwide, 20.9 percent of all black undergraduate students had at least one parent born in a foreign land. Thus, the percentage of recent immigrants among black students at the selective schools is significantly higher than the nationwide average. The data shows that of the immigrant black students at these 28 selective colleges, 43 percen
