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The goal of the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list is to help African American parents and students make the most enlightened choices about where to attend college and identify where students are most likely to be successful. We also provided four smaller lists of the top five schools within the following categories, as defined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: national universities, national liberal arts colleges, regional universities and regional liberal arts colleges.
Adds LaVeist: "People are going to look at the list and focus on where they are placed, but that's not what this is about. This list says that out of a universe of more than 3,000 schools, these 50, plus the honorable mentions, have fostered a great reputation among black educators and have done a good job of graduating students. Any school on this list should be proud-no matter where they are on it."
WHO'S NO. 1? When Audrey Forbes Manley, M.D. was inaugurated as president of Spelman College this pas October, officially taking the reins of the all-woman's college in Atlanta, she knew she'd become guardian of one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in America. After all, she is a graduate of Spelman, has served as a trustee on its board and is the widow of its fifth president. Now, the former U.S. Assistant Surgeon General has come home to serve as the bridge from Spelman's past into its future and as its first alumna president.
"Spelman has changed in significant ways since I was a student. The student body is larger, there's more diversity of interests and involvement of the students and the city of Atlanta has changed too," says Manley. "But in all that, the Spelman woman has not changed. The same kind of bright, talented and intelligent women that were attracted to Spelman 50 years ago are still attracted today."
As a testament to that interest, the college received 33,000 inquiries last year; it selected only 550 for its 1998-99 incoming freshman class from more than 4,000 applicants. Women in its entering freshman class boast an average GPA of 3.4 with a composite SAT score of 1106. Today, 37% enter Spelman majoring in the sciences.
Cited by other surveys as one of the top regional liberal arts colleges in the country, Spelman is the No. 1 school on our list. The school's reputation has been enhanced over the past 10 years by Manley's predecessor, Johnnetta B. Cole, Ph.D. Under Cole, the school's endowment increased to $170 million-the second largest of any HBCU. She added to its infrastructure with the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center and obtained funding to build a new science building which broke ground this past October.
But Spelman is not alone. HBCUs claim nine of the top 10 spots on our list. In addition to Spelman, two other Atlanta University Center schools-Morehouse College, Spelman's all-male counterpart, and co-ed Clark Atlanta University-join Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.'s, Howard University to round out the top five schools on the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list. "
The competitiveness of HBCUs is underscored by one of the most impressive finds of this effort: while HBCUs were only 10% of all the colleges surveyed by LaVeist, they represent nearly 50% of the schools on the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list.
While 35% of black students go to HBCUs; most attend predominantly white colleges and universities. When she was looking for a college to attend, Samanthia Sanders of Fort Washington, Maryland, says she was looking for one with name recognition and racial diversity. "I didn't want my degree to be questioned. I wanted people to know what school I went to. I also wanted something that would prepare me for what the world is actually like, because the world is not all-black," says the 20-year-old Florida State University business major.
"As college boards report, FSU is the only university in the country in the top ten for white and black students," says the school's provost, Lawrence Abele, Ph.D.
However, FSU, No. 26 on the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list, is not the top representative of the Sunshine State. That honor goes to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Better known as FAMU, the public school was also named "College of the Year" by Time magazine/Princeton Review for 1998. Like other schools on the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list, the college is a favorite among corporate donors and recruiters. It's also giving strong competition to prestigious Ivy League and research schools such as Harvard (No. 28) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 45) for African American National Achievement Scholars. "We have a strong set of academic programs and job opportunities are among the best in higher education. We also have a graduate feeder program which pays for FAMU students with a 3.0 GPA or higher to go to certain grad, medical or law schools," says FAMU's president Frederick S. Humphries.
Perhaps no public higher education system has faced as much scrutiny and vilification as the University of California. Comprised of eight campuses in different parts of the state, the UC system is considered to be the elite level in California's educational system. But the advent of the anti-affirmativ action initiative known as Proposition 209 decimated what little there was of any formal inclusion efforts directed specifically to minorities . What resulted was a steep drop in acceptances, and in the number of students applying this included those who were admitted and ultimately decided not to enroll. Henry and Catherine Josephs of San Diego said they'd prepared their 18-year-old son Reggie to be rejected by the UC system in the wake of Prop 209's passage, although he had a 3.65 GPA and scored 1180 on his SATs. "That's when I decided that I couldn't just rely on my GPA and SAT scores," the younger Josephs says. "I had to have more leadership and extra curricular activities."
After deciding to stay in state-there's no place better than California," says Josephs -to pursue his ambition of becoming a filmmaker, he applied to UC schools in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego. But he hedged his bets and also applied to Cal State Long Beach, the elite private institution of the University of Southern California, No. 30 on the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list.
Josephs, now a student at UCLA, was accepted at all except Berkeley, which admitted only 224 black students and enrolled only 98 in 1998. And while the Prop 209-era environment for black students at UC systems schools may be uncertain-only 131 enrolled at UCLA. in 1998, down from 219 the previous year-the school made the BLACK ENTERPRISE/DAYSTAR TOP 50 list at No. 42.
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