Minority Groups Sticking To Minority Serving Colleges

Jonathan Lekstutis
November 28, 2007

Undergraduate students who are part of minority groups are more and more attending universities that are classified as “minority serving,” according to a U.S Education Department report released on Tuesday.

The report, “Characteristics of Minority-Serving Institutions and Minority Undergraduates Enrolled in These Institutions,” studies the number of two and four year colleges whose undergraduate enrollment is at least 25 percent minority. This number rose from 414 in 1984 to 1,254 in 2004. In 1984 minority-serving colleges enrolled 38 percent of all minority undergraduates; by 2004 they enrolled 58 percent of them.

In total, minority-serving institutions made up 32 percent of all colleges in 2004; this was up from only 14 percent in 1984. That increase came with the growth in minority undergraduate enrollment, which shot up146 percent, to 4.7 million over the 20 year period.

The biggest sector of growth was in the category of black-serving colleges, whose number rose from 200 in 1984 to 622 twenty years later. Over the same time period, the number of Hispanic-serving colleges also climbed steadily from 58 to 366.

A lot of the increases came from for-profit colleges. In 2004, there were 36 percent of minority-serving colleges in the for-profit sector, compared with 15 percent of non-minority-serving colleges. Forty three percent of black colleges were for profit. This was the largest representation of profit colleges. Black colleges were followed by Hispanic serving colleges, of which 41 percent were for-profit.