Rate of Minorities Attending College on Decline

WASHINGTON â€”  The percentage of minority young people attending college has plummeted since the mid-1970s, and the decline, surprisingly, has been about as sharp for middle-class students as poor ones, a report said Sunday.

The study by the American Council on Education said the percentage of white young people going to college, meanwhile, has increased, “widening the longstanding college-participation gap between whites and African Americans and Hispanics.�

“Since the mid-1970s, the college participation of African Americans and Hispanics has been a picture not of progress, but of major regression,� said the Eighth Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education.

The study attributed the decline at least partly to a shift in helping students pay for college with loans instead of grants, higher college admission standards and increasing numbers of young black men from middle-income and upper-income backgrounds joining the military.

The study said that between 1976 and 1988 the percentage of low-income black high school graduates going to college declined from 40% to 30% and that the percentage of low-income Latinos fell from 50% to 35%, “indicating an educational failure rate of intolerable magnitude.�

The college participation rate for middle-income blacks fell from 53% in 1976 to 36% in 1988, and the corresponding rates for Latinos dropped from 53% in 1976 to 46% in 1988, the report found.

“We suspected, of course, that most of the decline we had seen over the last 12 to 13 years was taking place with lower-income students,� Deborah Carter, who wrote the study with Reginald Wilson, told reporters.

“We were somewhat surprised to see the decline, particularly for African Americans, was almost equally as great for low-income students as with middle-income students,� she said.

Among blacks, the decline in college participation was steepest for men.