LANSING – All of the state’s universities show a gap in six-year graduation rates between white students and minorities, some of them significant, a report released Wednesday by the Education Trust showed.
The report, which looked at higher education institutions across the country based on data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education for 2011, did find some universities graduating black students at nearly the same or even higher rates as whites, but none in Michigan. In most cases, Hispanic students also graduated at lower rates than whites.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for instance, showed 60.1 percent of blacks graduating within six years, compared to whites at 51.9 percent and all students at 53.5 percent. That school, though, graduated only 48 percent of Hispanic students.
“Success in college is not simply a function of student characteristics, and high price does not necessarily equal high quality,” said Michael Dannenberg, director of higher education and education finance policy at The Education Trust, in a statement announcing the report. “What individual colleges do often can make all the difference in the world between a student graduating or leaving with a pile of debt and no degree. Demography is not destiny and what colleges do matters.”
In Michigan, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor showed both the highest overall graduation rate, 89.5 percent, and the highest graduation rates for minorities, with 77.6 percent of blacks and 88.3 percent of Hispanics seeing a degree within six years. But 90.8 percent of white students graduated in that time.
Still, that 13.2 percentage point gap put U-M in about the middle of the pack. And the school had only 4.5 percent black students and 4.3 percent Hispanic.
The release called out Michigan State University, which had a 77.3 percent overall graduation rate, leaving a 25.5 percent gap between whites (80.9 percent) and blacks (55.4 percent). Hispanics graduated at 61.5 percent.
Some 7.3 percent of Spartans were black and 3.1 percent were Hispanic.
But Northern Michigan University showed the largest gap. With an overall graduation rate of 47.8 percent, white students graduated at a rate of 49.3 percent, while blacks were at only 8 percent and Hispanics at only 33.3 percent. The school also had only 1.8 percent black students and 0.7 percent Hispanic.
Wayne State University, located within the state’s largest black population and, at 28.8 percent, with the largest black student population, had the second-highest graduation gap at 31.1 percentage points for blacks. Only 7.5 percent of black students graduated, while 38.6 percent of white students did. Among Hispanics, 16.7 percent graduated among the 3 percent of the overall student population.
The smallest gap was the University of Michigan-Dearborn at only 5.4 percentage points. There, 50.9 percent of white students graduated compared to 45.5 percent of blacks and 59.1 percent of Hispanics. The school was 10.4 percent black and 4.1 percent Hispanic (the highest percentage among the 13 institutions).
U-M Dearborn was among four where Hispanics graduated at a higher rate than whites. Lake Superior State University showed the best comparative graduation rate for Hispanics, with 44.4 percentage points more of those students graduating than whites. The school showed 80 percent of Hispanic students graduated compared to 35.6 percent of whites and 28.6 percent of blacks.
Saginaw Valley State University and Oakland University also graduated a higher percentage of Hispanic students than whites, the report showed.
