The University has the highest graduation rate for African-American students, at 87 percent, of all the nation's public universities, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education's annual report. The University has led other public universities in African-American graduation rates for the past 13 years.
Chief Diversity Officer Bill Harvey credited the work of the Office of Admissions, the Office of African-American Affairs and the University's peer advising program for the University's high graduation rate of African-American students.
"The racial climate here may be more favorable," said Marcus Martin, assistant vice president of the Office for Diversity and Equity. "The sense of belonging fostered at U.Va." causes a higher graduation rate.
Harvey also said the socio-economic indicators are higher for black students at the University and that and there is a fairly high correlation between economic success and success in college.
Across the country, African-Americans graduated at an average rate of 43 percent. Selective private universities, such as Harvard or Princeton, continue to lead all other educational institutions on a statistical basis.
The graduation rates of "so-called flagship state universities," the report said, are important in terms of "gauging the success of the particular state in graduating large numbers of black students," because these universities educate the vast majority of all African-American college students.
"Of flagship state universities, the University of Virginia is the leader by far in successfully graduating black students," the report said.
The University is the only public institution in the top 20, and the University's closest competitors -- the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York at Binghamton -- scored 72 percent.
OAAA Interim Dean Maurice Apprey said "the numbers show a total institutional effort."
The report noted, however, that the "influx of talented black students at selective flagship universities from out of state tends to inflate the overall black student graduation rate at these universities."
The University's African-American graduation rate, however, is the same as it was in 1998, and Harvey noted that programs or ideas might need to be "tweaked" in the future.
"Ideally, the African-American graduation rate is the same as the white student graduation rate," Harvey said. "We need to find out from our students, both the ones who have been successful and the ones who haven't been, what impediments there are and how they think they can be removed."
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