You Go Girl!: Trends in Educational Attainment of Black Women

Using the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System Completion Survey by Race (1980–2009), we seek to redirect the conversation about African-American females as single mothers, welfare recipients, and victims of the AIDS epidemic to one that highlights their exceptional school enrollment levels and postsecondary degree attainment. We examine separately the educational trends for black women by citizenship status and identify institutions that have been successful at conferring degrees to each group of black women. We find that the percentage of black women enrolled as first-time freshmen was greater than the percentage of any other non-white group, the growth in the total number of black women enrolled at for-profit institutions as first-time freshmen more than double and HBCUs were institutions most successful at conferring degrees to black women.