http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/52_harvard-blackstudents.html
In the late 1960s major universities were recruiting low-income or so-called ghetto blacks. Not so today. If Harvard has set the pattern for others, it appears likely that most blacks currently enrolled at our elite institutions of higher education come from middle- or high-income families."Ivy League Generosity Will Lure Affluent and Brightest Blacks Away From State Universities," News and Views, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, January 3, 2008
Many, if not most Americans, believe that the 1960s protest movement that produced aggressive college recruitment of “ghetto kids” continues today bringing significant numbers of low-income and often underqualified blacks to America's elite campuses.
But the conventional wisdom is false.
In a 2004 interview Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard, told the London Observer, “The black kids who come to Harvard or Yale are middle class. Nobody else gets through.”
http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/010308insert.html
Once upon a time back in the 1960s, Harvard aimed to recruit high-potential black students from the so-called urban ghettos. In recent years, it appears that the vast majority of black students at Harvard come from upper-middle-class to affluent families. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, has stated his belief that very few of Harvard’s black students are the descendants of American slaves and that most black students at Harvard were from middle-class or affluent black families. A 2006 study by researchers at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania found that more than one quarter of the native-born black students at 28 selective colleges and universities came from families with annual incomes over $100,000. Therefore, the new Harvard financial aid plan is likely to add more relatively affluent black students to a group that is already relatively affluent.
