Last month I reported that South Dakota’s college campuses are the whitest in America and that what relatively few racial minorities we do have in our higher education system don’t graduate at the same rates as South Dakota’s white students. A new study shows that those lower graduation rates and other disparities make South Dakota the sixth-worst state for black equity in higher education.
The University of Southern California Race and Equity Center measured equity by four criteria:
- Representation: the percentage of black students in the undergraduate population versus the black percentage of the state’s population.
- Gender: the ratio of black female students to black male students in the state’s higher education system versus the national female/male ratio across all races.
- Completion: Black graduation rates versus overall graduation rates.
- Black Student:Faculty Ratio: the ratio of black students to black faculty.
As you can see from the above chart, four of South Dakota’s six public universities have a lower percentage of black students than South Dakota’s already tiny statewide black population of 2.4%. Our two blackest campi, DSU and USD, only have 3.5% and 2.8% black populations.
But those small populations have the least effect on our low black equity score. While women generally outnumber men in higher education, our six universities’ black student bodies range between 63.9% (SDSU) and 97.1% (Mines) male. Black graduation rates are between 2.9% (Black Hills) and 34.1% (Northern) lower than our campi’s overall graduation rates. (Interestingly, that low disparity at BHSU is an artifact of their anomalously low 33.7% overall graduation rate, the only grad rate below 40% among our universities.)
Our two biggest universities, SDSU and USD, each had 8 black faculty members in the survey year of 2016 and thus manage middling black student:faculty ratios of 17 to 1. Black Hills State and Mines each reported only one black faculty member; DSU and Northern had none.
Those numbers crunch into a GPA-like score of 1.63 for South Dakota. The only states scoring lower are the following:
- Louisiana: 1.18
- Nebraska and North Dakota: 1.38
- Mississippi: 1.42
- Kansas: 1.61
We don’t have that many black students, but what few we have appear to be underrepresented and underserved in South Dakota’s public universities.
So are you and USC saying SD should be racist and hire professors based on race?
It seems rather racist to imply that a black person needs a black teacher or they will not learn.
Does this also apply to Native Americans, Hispanics, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, etc. etc.?
The largest population of Black Americans all work with me at Ellsworth. They are hard working, dedicated and due to mission requirements take their classes online. The only racist in they state are actually; 1) Not living in South Dakota, or 2) People that are just trying to make racism and issue hoping to make others think they are more enlightened when they call everyone else racist.
For the people that do not work with minorities and do not understand they are people just like we are you disgust me, and yes, I am the decider of who disgusts me.
Dicta,
We need your input on this.
So I’m guessing that the Black male students, who far outnumber the women, in contrast to national gender averages, play basketball and football. And don’t graduate. That doesn’t speak well for any school when their scholarship recipients don’t graduate. In theory, isn’t that the purpose of a scholarship, financial assistance for earning a degree?
Debbo,
Whose responsibility is it to graduate?
The student or the school?
Are you saying the black student athlete doesn’t have the ability to study and pass the courses?
“Are you saying the black student athlete doesn’t have the ability to study and pass the courses?”
Read again. Did I say that? You can answer your own question. Did I address responsibility? Answer your own question.
So you are blaming the school then when a person doesn’t graduate?
The fact is it is the student’s responsibility to graduate Debbo. That is a stone cold fact.
Where did I say that?
I don’t know what time it is in Russia, but it’s nearly 1:00 a.m. where i am in the USA and I’m going to bed.
Debbo wrote”
That doesn’t speak well for any school when their scholarship recipients don’t graduate. In theory, isn’t that the purpose of a scholarship, financial assistance for earning a degree?
Who is responsible for taking the tests and passing them Debbo?
It’s obvious from your above posts that you think black athletes can’t be intelligent. I think you are wrong and are a racist for thinking a skin color determines intelligence.
“so you’re saying”—that’s a sure sign that, once again, Jason wants to argue something other than what I actually said, because he can’t refute the facts I report and only wants to marginalize me personally. How very tiresome.
Debbo introduces a very important point: if we are recruiting diverse student populations only for the purpose of boosting athletics but not putting equal emphasis on helping those athletes graduate, then we are failing those students. Sure, students have a responsibility to hit the books and graduate, but the schools that recruit them to play sports have an obligation to help those students achieve what should be every student’s primary goal. If nothing else, ensuring completion of a degree is fair payment for the free marketing labor those athletes do for the institution.
It is not racist to recognize that black students and other minority students face barriers to graduation that majority students do not. Many of those barriers are tied to racism, both personal and institutional.
On just the issue of black student/Faculty ratio: It’s hard to be a minority. It’s less hard when one has fellow minority members to turn to for support. It is fair and not racist to observe that black students on the DSU and Northern campi, who have no black faculty members to serve as role models and mentors, lack a form of support that black students at our other universities do not. That’s not to say that professors of other races cannot be role models and mentors for black students, and that’s not to say that every black professor will fill those roles well (Bill Cosby had a doctorate). But in general, the presence of black faculty offers black students more opportunity for conversation and support and thus a more equitable educational experience.
How we improve that equity as a matter of policy, I do not specify in this post, in which I simply report the facts as a basis for discussion.
Jason seems like he’s one that suffers from some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He grabs at a sentence or word one of us writes in a comment and obsesses over it nonstop. That annoying kind of person with ADD and OCD. As a disclaimer I am not putting down anyone with these disorders.
The colleges recruit the best football players they can get regardless of race.
What barriers do minorities face to graduate Cory?
I wonder if Black Russian bots would show up at DFP just to be argumentative like white Russian trolls? The white ones don’t really add much to the conversation unless you consider disruption and hijacking positive additions.
Jenny is right. And when Jason can’t get me or someone else to play his word games he just makes stuff up about us.
Observation and description are not racism. The report uses each school’s statistical observations to write a report, which is the description. Cory and I and others have made our own observations based on the report. That is not racism. It never has been.