Minority Success in Graduation Rates Reported at UC-Riverside

UC RIVERSIDE: Diversity is more than numbers (excerpt)

Sunday, November 7, 2010

By DAVID OLSON

The Riverside Press-Enterprise

After Obi Okafor found out he had been accepted to four University of California campuses, he did some research. “I went online to look at the demographic spread and saw that UCR had the highest African-American student population,” Okafor said. “I felt that was where I would feel more comfortable going to school.”

High-achieving black students such as Okafor illustrate why UC Riverside has earned a national reputation not only for enrolling a large number of black and Latino pupils but for helping them succeed.

U.S. News and World Report this year named UCR the nation’s fourth most ethnically diverse research university. Nearly 40 percent of undergraduates this fall are Asian, 31 percent Latino, 16 percent white and 8 percent black. U.S. News also ranked UCR the 15th most economically diverse campus, because of its large number of low-income students…

An August report by The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based educational research organization, touted UCR as a model for educating African-American and Latino students. UCR was one of only 11 universities nationwide at which black and Latino students graduated at about the same or higher rate than white students, the report found…

Nearly 67 percent of black students and 63.4 percent of Hispanic students who entered UCR between 2000 and 2002 graduated within six years, compared with 62.4 percent of white students, according to the Education Trust study…

Full article at http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/PE_News_Local_D_diversity08.44433d4.html