A Study of the Number of Black Graduate Student Applications for Fall, 1970

Abstract

This report presents some statistical data on black graduate student applicants. Twenty-five major graduate schools were requested to supply information on the number of identifiable black applicants by field; 11 were able to supply the data. They were: Berkeley, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Minnesota, MIT, Syracuse, University of Wisconsin, and Yale. Applications varied from 346 to 84. Berkeley had 346 applications, 7 schools had between 100 and 200 applicants, and 3 had under 100. Some university departments attracted disproportionately large percentages of the total number of applicants in a particular field: MIT, for example, received 62% of all city planning applications, and Brown University received 45% of the total number in Romance Studies. The humanities and social sciences attracted 85% of the students, while the physical sciences received fewer than 10% of the applications. The total number of applications to the 11 institutions was 1,694 - a very small percentage of the approximately 50,000 Blacks who received undergraduate degrees in 1969-70. Of 546 applications examined for duplication of applicants, 425 represented actual individuals.