Fewer black students at USC now

By JAMES T. HAMMOND

jhammond@thestate.com

RACE, ETHNICITY CHANGING IN USC STUDENT BODY

The University of South Carolina is marginally more diverse today than it was in 1999, as Hispanic, Asian and other minority student groups have grown.

But while overall minority enrollment is up slightly, the percentage of black students has steadily declined during the same period, to 14 percent of the student body today from 19 percent in 1999.

Asian undergraduate enrollment, for example, has jumped 23 percent since 1999, to 525 from 426.

Undergraduate enrollment of whites, while up in numbers because of a larger student body, today is about 71 percent compared with 73 percent in 1999.

But even as the total undergraduate student body has grown by 2,811, black undergraduate enrollment has declined by 498 students since 1999. That represents a 17 percent drop to 2,509 students .

Steve Benjamin, a Columbia attorney and USC alumnus who serves on the USC Development Foundation board, said he was surprised by the trend in black enrollment, but he expressed confidence in USC to reverse the trend. “We just have to be better focused,” he said.

Benjamin, who was USC student government president in 1990-91, said South Carolina has “a deep talent pool of African-American students.”

“South Carolina’s greatest export in the past 100 years has been our young leaders, especially our black youth,” Benjamin said. “USC can do better and it should do better.”

USC vice president for student affairs Dennis Pruitt said USC has long prided itself on being the school of choice for many of South Carolina’s best and brightest black students.

But several social and academic pressures have eroded USC’s black enrollment, including the fact that South Carolina’s school system has not prepared black students, on average, as well as it has served white students, Pruitt said. About 55 percent of black students required some remedial work to qualify for college, Pruitt said.

In addition, Pruitt said USC now must compete with the top-tier public and private universities nationally for South Carolina’s highest-achieving black students. African-American seniors who rank in the top of their high school classes often have their choice of schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Duke.

As political pressures and legal cases force universities to abandon racial quotas, the most prestigious national universities increasingly reach out to states like South Carolina to cherry-pick the highest-achieving black students to maintain their own diversity goals, Pruitt said.

Pruitt believes that to boost black enrollment, more African-Americans must be encouraged to apply for admission to USC. That means helping black high school students who might be the first in their families to apply to college to overcome anxieties about the process and to educate them about what they must do to qualify for admission.

Reach Hammond at (803) 771-8474.