 Media Credit: Tommy Giglio/The Daily Northwestern Five members of FMO's Executive Board. From left: Weinberg sophomore Mark Crain, technical director; Weinberg junior Monica Harris, acting coordinator; Communication sophomore Angela Ellington, publicity chair; Communication sophomore Zachary Parker, fundraising chair; and SESP sophomore Jeniece Fleming, ASG senator.
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By Jennifer ChenThe Daily Northwestern
Black enrollment at Northwestern has dropped by almost half in the past three decades, a DAILY study of university records found.
The community has shrunk steadily since 1976, when NU's black undergraduate enrollment reached its height at 9.6 percent. Then, there were 667 such students on campus.
By 2005, blacks made up 5.5 percent of NU's 8,023 undergraduates.
Asian American enrollment leapt from 12 percent to 17 percent between 1992 and 1994, and has hovered at about 16 percent. Latino numbers have tended to increase, reaching 5.2 percent last year.
According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black populations at several other top U.S. universities - including Harvard University, Columbia University, Duke University, and Stanford University among others - have topped or neared 10 percent of their student bodies. At Washington University in St. Louis, the number is 6.2 percent, while at the University of Chicago it is 6.4 percent.
NU's downward trend was no surprise to the NU Black Alumni Association, which has begun pressing the administration to react to the decreasing numbers. But it was only after chatting with black alumni at a Homecoming Tailgate that For Members Only Acting Coordinator Monica Harris heard of the decline.
"I was talking with alumni, and they told me that we were close to 10 percent (of the total undergraduate population) in the '80s," the Weinberg junior said. "The only response we could give was, 'We've never seen that before in our time. We've been lucky to have 500 students.'"
The last time black undergraduate enrollment was at about 500 was 1992, with blacks at 6.8 percent of the undergraduate population. Since then it has dropped to the low 400s.
