Black Enrollment Declines.

Although black Americans made major economic and social gains in the mid twentieth century, that progress stagnated by the 1980s. "Many blacks remain separated from the mainstream of national life under conditions of great inequality in education, housing and health care," concluded the National Research Council in A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society in 1989. Certainly progress in higher education had slowed. Blacks remained underrepresented in graduate and professional degree attainment and were actually losing ground in undergraduate education compared to the momentum of the 1970s. By 1989 the number of black men enrolled in universities and colleges in the United States had declined to 436,000 from the high point in 1976 of 470,000, according to an American Council on Higher Education study. Although the number of black women rose from 563,000 in 1976 to 645,000 in 1989, the overall percentage of black students in higher education...