The set-up seems to be more than adequate, but the University appears to lack something in its follow through.
According to numbers released by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Penn is doing a pretty good job of welcoming balck students with acceptance letters, admitting approximately 30 percent of blacks compared to about 20 percent overall. But while nearly two-thirds of all accepted students matriculate at Penn, only 40 percent of African Americans do.
The story is, surprisingly, much the same at our peer institutions. Harvard, which boasts a staggering 80 percent overall yield is only able to attract 60 percent of black students it has admitted. M.I.T., which normally nets about 60 percent of its admitted students sees only half of admitted blacks enroll.
And it does not change much the higher you go on the U.S. News and World Report rankings -- nearly 40 percent of black students turn down coveted offers from Harvard and almost half of black students accepted to Princeton choose not to go. Yale did not provide data to the Journal.
These numbers are troubling particularly for Penn, where blacks make up only 5.9 percent of the student body, 19th out of 27 on the Journal's list of "highest-ranked universities." Among Ivy League schools, only Cornell's black population constitutes a smaller percentage of the total student body, and two schools that finish behind Penn -- the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles -- are specifically forbidden by state law from taking race into account in admissions decisions.
The University needs to work hard to ensure that our new No. 4 U.S. News ranking, among other modest improvements, improves Penn's overall yield, demonstrating that we really are in competition for the same highly-sought-after students as our neighbors to the north.
But more acutely, College Hall must improve the black student yield, focusing first on why it is so low. Solving the problems that convince blacks not to matriculate to Penn could only make this a better University.
