Students in a class on the HBO series “The Wire.” Photo: Meredith Kolodner
Hechinger’s Meredith Kolodner, writing in The Atlantic, explains how Rutgers-Newark helps black students graduate.
Nationwide, the four-year college graduation rate for black students is half that of whites, she writes. At Rutgers-Newark, blacks are as likely as whites to make it to a degree.
In 2015, Rutgers-Newark’s six-year graduation rate was 64 percent for black students and 63 percent for white students, according to administrators, compared with 40 percent and 61 percent respectively at public institutions nationally. Among public universities whose student populations are at least 5 percent black and one-quarter low-income, Rutgers-Newark had the second-highest black male graduation rate in the nation in 2013 and the fifth-highest black graduation rate overall.
The university recruits “low-income, urban, public high-school graduates with mediocre test scores,” Kolodner writes. About 18 percent are black and 24 percent Latino.
Newark residents get free tuition. The university has beefed up financial and health counseling. Faculty have created courses such as Shakespeare and Race, Literature and Controversy, and Love Stories Old and New (taught by a professor of medieval literature).