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Higher Education

The history of diversity in American higher education is turbulent and still evolving. In the United States, colleges and universities currently serve students from a wide variety of ethnicities, classes, genders, sexualities, abilities, and ages. There are currently almost 4,500 two-year and four-year institutions of higher education serving over 20 million students. Some of these institutions were established well before the American Revolution.

The earliest colleges and universities in North America were established as seminaries and religious institutions for the training of clergy. Institutions of higher learning in the 17th and 18th centuries focused on the liberal arts and served white European colonists. The emphasis on occupation-specific majors was nonexistent.

The curriculum of American colleges and universities has changed along with shifts in the country's economic and sociocultural realities. In the early 20th century, Harvard University introduced the first college majors to prepare students for work or advanced study in specific fields and disciplines. These kinds of programs have become the standard for universities around the world.

To cope with the sociocultural realities of students from more diverse ethnic, sexual, and economic backgrounds, many colleges and universities created programs toward the end of the 20th century. These programs included centers for the study of specific ethnicities and sexualities; campus organizations that allowed students to learn more about diverse backgrounds; and programs to assist students whose parents had not graduated from or even attended college.

Moving into the future, colleges and universities are going to have to cope with lower budgets and still find ways to address falling graduation rates among college students from almost all social-cultural and economic backgrounds.

Ethnicity-Based Colleges and Universities

In the wake of the Civil War, colleges and universities in former confederate states refused to admit African Americans to their universities. In response, schools began to open to serve this group of potential scholars.

Today, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have hundreds of thousands of students enrolled, though not all of them continue to have a student body made up primarily of African American students.

HBCUs have a considerably higher graduation rate for their African American students than predominantly white institutions’ (PWI) campuses. This has been linked to numerous factors including a higher ratio of African American professors to African American students; more programs designed to facilitate retention of students; and heightened awareness of the unique needs of African American college students. Ultimately, even at HBCUs the graduation rate among African American students is below the national average across all ethnicities, indicating a need for more efforts to equalize academic achievement.

More recently, colleges and universities have opened with the intention of providing improved education to other underrepresented minority students, including Native Americans, Latinos/as, and Muslims. These institutions report similar results to those of HBCUs, with higher than average graduation rates for the minority groups they serve.

The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) has championed Hispanic-serving institutions (HSI) in Congress and helped gain recognition and funding from the federal government. HSIs are those colleges and universities with 25 percent or more Hispanic students. HACU currently has 243 member HSIs across the country.

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